What’s particularly disturbing in all of this is not so much the state complicity, Indian government having always been instrumental in the persecution of its Muslims. What is most disturbing is that the chief minister of Gujarat who made the pogrom possible later became India’s prime minister: Narendra Modi.

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The Wire recently reported:

India’s response to 2002 came in 2014; the 2014 election result would not have been possible without 2002. Why do I say so? Because there was something dramatically different about the violence of 2002 and the other instances of mass violence India had witnessed against Muslims and Sikhs before. Never had the leader of the state sounded so brazen about it.

The violence was called a shame for Gujarat. As a retort, Narendra Modi led a Gujarat gaurav yatra; apparently to restore the honour that was sullied by the ‘enemies of the state’. “What was there to be ashamed of?” he asked his people, leading them into active denial of the violence. In his speeches during the yatra, he made his people believe that the story of violence was a conspiracy of enemies who wanted to tarnish the image of Gujaratis.

As always, we’ll try in this article to give some context to all these issues.

Gujarati Muslims and Their Contributions to Islam

As per the 2011 census, Muslims make around 10% of Gujarat’s total population.

Like other Gujaratis, the Muslims are mainly into trade and business. Because of this, they have been travelling all around the world. Much of the “Indian” community you find in southern and eastern Africa, for instance, is  mostly Gujarati in background.

Some of South Africa’s best-known Muslims have been ethnic Gujaratis, including such luminaries as Ahmed Deedat. And for those who have a familiarity with Gujarati surnames, they can find them among the current South African Islamic scholars (“Kathrada,” “Dockrat” and so on, to just take some examples featured on the MuslimSkeptic “Knowledge Series“).

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These Gujarati Muslims mainly hailed from Surat, which, for centuries under the Mughal rule, used to be India’s most prosperous port city, and as such also attracted Muslim merchants from all over the world. This is why many of the locals from this part of Gujarat have foreign ancestry (namely Arab and Persian, but also Turkic and African to a lesser degree.)

This cosmopolitan nature of Gujarati Muslims, which further differentiates them from their non-Muslim neighbors, can be found in the faces of its people as well their architecture, their food, and their language.

Being a transcontinental, always-on-the-move, trading community, Gujarati Muslims thus played an active role in the spread of Islam, mainly into Southeast Asia.

Times of India reported:

“One of these legacies was Islam. There were influential scholars and teachers of Islam from Gujarat who, though few in number, planted the seeds of their belief in local disciples who in turn spread the word throughout the (Malay-Indonesian) archipelago. Gujarat was also the base of Islamic scholars from the archipelago who returned home to propagate the religion,” writes Leonard Andaya, a professor of Southeast Asian History at University of Hawaii at Manoa, in the book ‘Gujarat and the Sea.’

One of these Gujarati Muslim scholars was the 17th century author Nuruddin ar-Raniri, considered the first Muslim scholar of Southeast Asia.

He worked at the court of the sultan of Aceh, Aceh being a province in the northeast of Indonesia which then became a regional center of Islamic scholarship and which today has also the particularity of being the only province to apply Sharia officially in the country.

We could multiply the contributions made by Gujarati Muslims for the strengthening of Islam in India itself but also in many parts of Africa and Asia and, increasingly, in the West.

Hindu Sexual Frustration and Muslim Women

As often with Hindutva violence against Muslims, there’s a whole angle of sexual violence, which was particularly dramatic in this specific case of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

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Tanika Sarkar is a well-known contemporary Indian historian who specializes in Hindu nationalism or Hindutva.

She wrote about the Hindutva sexual frustration and sexual violence against Muslim women during the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

This is her contribution for the collective book Fascism in India: Faces, Fangs, and Facts, released in 2003.

We will quote at length to show the extent of the Hindutva sexual frustration.

She wrote in pp. 159-162:

There is a dark sexual obsession about allegedly ultra-virile Muslim male bodies and overfertile Muslim female ones, that inspire and sustain the figures of paranoia and revenge. VHP leaflets, openly circulating in Gujarat today, signed by the state general secretary, Chinubhai Patel, promise: “We will cut them and their blood will flow like rivers. We will kill Muslims the way we destroyed Babri mosque”. This is followed by a poem

“The volcano which was inactive has erupted
It has burnt the arse of miyas and made them dance nude
We have untied the penises that were tied till now
We have widened the tight vaginas of the bibis”

One of the most spectacular forms of sadism in the recent events had been the way Muslim female and infantile bodies were made to function in the drama of Hindutva terror. There had been earlier anticipations of that. The investigations made by the AIDWA in 1992-93, especially in Surat and Bhopal, had pointed out several similar features. Women were “tortured, molested, raped, and then burnt to death”. Sometimes, their children were killed before their eyes. (…)

One can go on narrating the ways in which babies and women were tortured and killed, but the point here is often the two acts were coupled together. The pattern of cruelty suggests three things. One, the woman’s body was a site of almost inexhaustible violence, with infinitely plural and innovative forms of torture. Second, their sexual and reproductive organs were attacked with a special savagery. Third, their children, born and unborn, shared the attacks and were killed before their eyes. (…)

Beyond Godhra are the legends that all boys in the shakhas are bred on: partition time rapes of Hindu women, rapes of Hindu queens under Muslim rule, abductions of Hindu women all through history by Muslims. There is also the perpetual fear of a more virile Muslim male body that lures away Hindu girls, a kind of penis envy and anxiety about emasculation that can only be overcome by doing violent deeds. Violence, for the Sangh, is both source and proof of maleness. In the 1990s, when communal violence had intensified, bangles were sent to localities where riots had not taken place, to taunt Hindu men with effeminacy. At Jawaharlal Nehru University, a post-Godhra procession of the ABVP chanted: ‘Jis Hinduon ka khoon na khola, woh Hindu nahin, woh hijra hain’ (Those Hindus whose blood does not boil, are not Hindus, they are eunuchs’).

This identification between killing and masculinity, is a strong and uniquely Sangh teaching. In Gujarat, mobs who raped, sometimes came dressed in khaki shorts or in saffron underwear, rape being obviously seen as a religious duty, a Sangh duty. In times of violence, Hindu male sexual organs must function as instruments of torture. (…)

Muslim children are a promise of future growth, of community self-strengthening, of survival of the community beyond the pogroms. (…)

The burning of men, women and children, as the final move, served multiple functions: it was to destroy evidence, it was to make Muslims vanish, it was also to desecrate Muslim deaths by denying them an Islamic burial, and forcing a Hindu cremation upon them; a kind of a macabre post-mortem forced conversion.

We feel for our Muslim brothers and sisters in Gujarat and India as a whole who have to sustain such existential frustrations from their polytheist neighbours.

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