JACOBIN: The US Hindu Right Is Still Whitewashing the Gujarat Pogrom

By Safa Ahmed

February 27, 2002, was a normal Wednesday for five-year-old me. I woke up, put on my Cinderella backpack, and spent the day at school learning about bumblebees. On the other side of the world, in my parents’ homeland, the sun was setting over burning, bloody streets in the north Indian state of Gujarat, where one of the most horrific cases of mass anti-Muslim slaughter in modern Indian history was unfolding. Earlier that day, Muslims had been accused — with no evidence — of setting fire to a train full of Hindu pilgrims. By nightfall, Hindu militant mobs were ravaging Gujarat’s cities, slaughtering scores of innocent Muslims in “revenge.” Over the course of the next few weeks, an estimated two thousand men, women, and children would be murdered amid disturbing stories of gang rapes, mutilations, dismemberings, electrocutions, and lighting of bodies on fire. International human rights groups and news outlets alike would later recognize that the state government — led by then chief minister Narendra Modi and his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — was complicit in orchestrating the violence.

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