Reviewing Chatterjee’s Book on Anti-Muslim Riots in Gujarat in 2002-by Michael Roberts
Source:Thuppahis
Nishkula Suntharalingam, presenting a book review in Asian Affairs 2023 ….. https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raaf20 …. of the book by Moyukh Chatterjee. Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities. Duke University Press, Durham, 2023. pp. 166. Notes. Bibliog. Index. Ackmts. Hb. $94.95. ISBN 9781478017028. Sb. ………….$24.95. ISBN 9781478019664
Moyukh Chatterjee was an eyewitness to the aftermath of the 2002 riots in the west Indian state of Gujarat; three days of communal violence during which Hindu mobs attacked Muslims, their businesses and homes, leaving over a thousand people dead. This book focuses on how and why, in multi-ethnic, democratic states like India, targeted violence and anti-minority politics persist. In doing so, the author suggests an alternate approach to understanding violence against minorities while raising disquieting questions about the formation of modern states and the ways that ideas of “minorities” and “majorities” are produced and reproduced.
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401733 08: Indian state police patrol the streets of Ahmadabad, India after rioting between Muslims and Hindus March 1, 2002 in Ahmadabad, India, two days after a Muslim mob attacked a train, killing 58 people in the Indian state of Gujarat. Indian troops arrived in the riot-torn western state of Gujarat but were unable to quell the Hindu-Muslim violence that has claimed the lives of 251 people. (Photo by Ami Vitale/Getty Images)
Chatterjee’s research over the past 20 years has included interacting with, and collecting testimony from, survivors and witnesses of the 2002 pogrom. He has accompanied them to the courts, while also engaging and following up with human rights activists. His book analyses the per- sistent and recurring challenges faced by Muslim victims to gain justice from the Gujarat legal system. Accordingly, Chatterjee documents the state’s intended/unintended role in shaping police reporting, trials, public culture and media coverage that “fragment shifting formations of peoples into majorities and minorities” (p. 28).
The lack of action by the, apparently unaccountable, Gujarati authorities to redress the 2002 violence over more than a decade leads Chatterjee to emphasise the limitations of “exposure” as an approach (pp. 5–11). He stresses the challenges of characterising anti-minority violence as a breakdown, interruption or exception by drawing attention to the histories of pogroms in America (against Blacks), Europe (against Jews and Muslims), South-East Asia (for example, against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar) and South Asia (Tamils in Sri Lanka, Sikhs and Muslims in India). Instead, Chatterjee proposes a more deconstructed approach of “composing violence”. In his analysis, “composition” describes “how violence persists, motivates, and animates social and political life behind the scene of horror” (p. 8). His lines of inquiry ask: what forms of law, “affect” and politics transform violence against minorities into durable forms of rule of law? What can the Indian example tell us about the power of reactions to public violence against minorities to act as a catalyst for the creation of a permanent majority and the Muslims in India into permanent minorities and “outsiders”?
To “compose the violence” Chatterjee focuses on the legal infrastructure of the state including the ways that police report incidents and witnesses and victims give testimony, the processes of law and the courtroom describing them as “performances that delay and defer and outlive the event” (p. 21). Consequently, in chapters 2 through 5, he analyses the police archive, first incident reports, witness statements, trials of the lower courts of Ahmedabad, while engaging with activist NGOs and sur- vivors of the violence, both male and female. He draws attention to the systemic and repetitive difficulties of drafting first incident reports by police, whether as individual complaints or as an omnibus report, and exposes the challenges of Muslim witnesses testifying in courtrooms against their Hindu neighbours and the police. Chatterjee also showcases the procedural delays including the filing of reports, going to courts, the waiting and witnessing trials that contributes to the infrastructure of min- oritising Muslims in India and their sense of belonging.
The book provides significant insights into the ways the Gujarati authorities made use of the communal violence to produce and reproduce a relationship between Muslim minorities and Hindu majorities that is intertwined with the political struggle of belonging and citizenship in India more widely. Chatterjee’s argument, that democracy (free and fair elections, rule of law, due process) institutes a relationship between population numbers and power that locks societies into a trajectory of either minority or majority rule, merits closer review through case studies of other locales.
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Nishkala Suntharalingam is an Independent Researcher. She retired in December 2022 from the United Nations where she was most recently a Political Affairs Advisor covering Asia and the Pacific……….. NISHKALA SUNTHARALINGAM © 2023 …. ……………………………………………………..
https://d oi.org/10.1080/03068374.2023.2253057
SPECIAL NOTE
This item was sent to Thuppahi by Academia.com. It was converted into Word File by my friend David Sansoni in Sydney. The Highlighting IS an imposition by The Editor, Thuppahi.
According to official figures, the riots ended with 1,044 dead, 223 missing, and 2,500 injured. Of the dead, 790 were Muslim and 254 Hindu. The Concerned Citizens Tribunal Report, estimated that as many as 1,926 may have been killed. Other sources estimated death tolls in excess Of 2,000.(from Wikipedia where the fullacount is located here:
COMPARATIVE Bibliographical ‘Excursions’ for Reflection
Shamara Wettimuny: “The Jews of Ceylon: Anti-Semitism, prejudice and the Moors of Ceylon,” Modern Asian Studies, published online 2023:1-25 ……………………… doi:10.1017/S0026749X2300029X
Shamara Wettimuny: “On Kandy: How Myths about Minorities Underlie Violence,” https://groundviews.org/2018/03/09/on-kandy-how-myths-about-minorities-underlie-violence/
Shamara Wettimuny: “A brief history of anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka,” 22 July 2019, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/violence/a-brief-history-of-anti-muslim-violence-in-sri-lanka/
Shamara Wettimuny: “Colonial History of Islamophobic Slurs,” 20 September 2020, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/empire-decolonisation/colonial-history-islamophobia/
Michael Roberts: “Hobgoblins, Low-Country Sinhalese Plotters or Local Elite Chauvinists? Directions and Patterns in the 1915 Communal Riots”, Sri Lanka Journal of the Social Sciences, 1981, vol. 4: 83-126.
Michael Roberts: “Noise as Cultural Struggle: Tom-Tom Beating, the British and Communal Disturbances in Sri Lanka, 1880s-1930s,” in Veena Das (ed), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, Survivors in South Asia, Delhi: O.U. P., 1990, pp. 240-85.
Michael Roberts: “The Imperialism of Silence under the British Raj: Arresting the Drum,” in M. Roberts, Exploring Confrontation. Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History, Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994, pp.149-82.
Roberts, Michael 1994b “Mentalities: Ideologues, Assailants, Historians and the Pogrom against the Moors in 1915,” in M. Roberts, Exploring Confrontation. Sri Lanka: Politics, Culture and History, Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994, pp.182-212.
Ameer Ali, ACL 2019 “How extremisms have fed off Each Other in Sri Lanka 1950s-t0-2019 and Still Proceeding,” https://thuppahis.com/2019/05/06/how-extremisms-have-fed-off-each-other-in-sri-lanka-1950s-to-2019-and-still-proceeding/
Ameer Ali, ACL in Colombo Telegraph, 6 May 2019 where the title runs “Anatomy Of An Islamist Infamy – II” https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/anatomy-of-an-islamist-infamy-ii/
Javed Iqbal 2014 “The Forgotten Riots of Bhagalpur,”…………………………. https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2014/12/31/the-forgotten-riots-of-bhagalpur
Wikipedia on Bhagalpur Violence: ……………………. ………………………….. ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Bhagalpur_violence
HORRIFYING PHOTOGRAPHS from Racial Violence in INDIA directed …. hopefully … towards Evoking Hostility to Such A Process
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a Hindu Mob at Bhagalpur on the hunt for Muslims
…. an assortment of horrifying pictures of murdered victims at different sites of anti -Muslim atrocity in northern India … with THAT displaying a mo-bike passing acharred body perhaps depicting the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 after Indira Gandhi was assassinated
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