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Abstract
The violence in Gujarat in 2002 presented a paradoxical phenomenon, namely, a spectacle of violence ostensibly enacted by non-state forces that was covertly and overtly sanctioned by the state. Violence was both spatially localized and physically concentrated on Muslims. Apologists invoked a history of communal conflict and specifically of Muslim provocation, explaining the pogrom of 2002 as having ample precedent and justifiable cause. This paper addresses Ahmedabad's urbanity as an enabling locus for such violence, and draws on historical and ethnographic research to argue that spatial and perceptual practices in the city have combined to ghettoize Muslims, and produce forms of knowledge complicit with structural and episodic violence against them. Such practices (and their discursive uptake) are enabled by political conjunctures that give structurally embedded processes form and visibility. This paper explores the issue of political violence and Muslim vulnerability in Gujarat under the explanatory rubric of the ‘Special Political Zone,’ an informal analogue to a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the latter being a site exempt from prevailing regulations, purportedly to enhance economic growth. The political ability to endow specific sites with exceptional legal status for economic outcomes implies the ‘Special Political Zone,’ a site where select laws of the land are voided to ensure specific political outcomes, for example the staging of violence to dramatize the restructuring of the relationship between majority and minority. This paper offers a limited examination of this hypothesis taking Ahmedabad as a privileged site where much of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 was concentrated.
Notes
1. Portions of this article have been presented at Sciences Po in Paris, at a colloquium titled ‘Who is a Citizen in India Today?’ in June 2010, and at a conference titled ‘Cities and Fundamentalism’ at UC Berkeley in 2007. My thanks to those who responded with helpful comments and suggestions during these presentations. I would also like to thank the people who have helped in my research and writing, including Binu Alex, Bharat Desai, Rubina Jasani, Brij Kothari, Anosh Malekar, Carin McCormick, Jagdish Parikh, Aakar Patel, Fr. Cedric Prakash, Amrita Shah, Mukul Sinha, Ashim Roy, Ajay Umat and Achyut Yagnik.
2. See, for example, Satyakam Joshi, ‘Explosion in the “Laboratory”’ and ‘Preparation for Violence’.
3. Roy, ‘Gujarat Genocide’, pp. 3–17.
4. The campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya culminated under a BJP-led government in Uttar Pradesh, in 1992. Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao at the time argued that since law and order was a state subject, the central government could not intervene despite the threat to public safety in Uttar Pradesh. Hence the demolition went unhindered, albeit under the watch of tens of thousands of security personnel from the CRPF, BSF, RPF and other forces. Citizens’ Tribunal on Ayodhya, 1993. For a brilliant critical assessment of the implications of the events in Gujarat soon after the violence, see Baxi, ‘Notes on Holocaustian Politics’. Baxi sets out some of the terms of the theoretical and political challenges before critics posed by the Gujarat violence, and concludes with some (understandably) modest proposals for policy intervention. While he describes the ‘holocaustian’ turn of political outcomes, my own essay seeks to uncover infrastructural conditions and perceptual practices that assist in the conduct of, as well as the denial of violence.
5. Bachchan's move drew fierce criticism, and in his response to critics he distinguished between endorsing Gujarat in terms of its history, and its government, although the ‘branding’ was itself sponsored by the government. See, for example, ‘I am Endorsing Gujarat's Glory as Brand Ambassador, not Present Govt: Bachchan’, PTI, March 25, 2010. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/I-am-endorsing-Gujarats-glory-as-brand-ambassador-not-present-govt-Bachchan/articleshow/5721971.cms (accessed July 26, 2010).
6. Declared to be public utilities under the Industrial Disputes Act, strikes are illegal in SEZs. The precursor to the SEZ, the Export Processing Zone or EPZ, was first established in Kandla, Gujarat, in 1965, to replace the deepwater port facilities lost in Karachi, following Partition. The port of Kandla itself was inaugurated about a decade earlier. By the 1990s, the provision came to be treated mainly as a regulatory loophole to be exploited by businesses. What mainly resulted then were schemes to acquire real estate, and often, windfall profits, while avoiding taxation, and relying on existing public infrastructure without contributing to it in any way. See TNC Rajagopalan, ‘Govt Must Quickly Review its Present SEZ Policy’, Business Standard, June 28, 2010, 6. A special report on the state of Gujarat's economy in one of the business papers reports that exports from Gujarat's SEZs accounted for over Rs. 1 lakh crore of the total exports of Rs. 2 lakh crore from all of India's SEZs in 2009–10. Maulik Pathak and Kalpesh Damor, ‘The Entrepreneurial State’, Business Standard Special Report: Gujarat: Home of Indian Enterprise, August 2010, 3.
7. State-led economic development itself is conducted like an emergency, to be sure. Here what I am pointing to is the regularization of governmental discourse in this respect. The abbreviations cited are VIP: Very Important Person, for whom exceptions of all kinds are routinely made; MOU: Memorandum of Understanding, for example, between the government and a company, for example, outlining the terms on which rights may be granted to the company in return for its anticipated contribution to the exchequer; RTI: the Right to Information (Act), used by citizens applying to have specific items of information released by petitioning the PIO or Public Information Officer of any government department. RTI can be seen as an indirect example of my point: in a context where few demands for information can be made of the government without provoking suspicion or in fact, being rejected, the RTI Act of 2005 made available a limited right, namely the right to obtain a response about whether a precisely designated piece of information could be provided, and if not, to disclose that such information could in fact not be disclosed.
8. My discussion here draws on Agamben's work, but seeks to extend his discussion from sites that he mainly focuses on such as the concentration camp to the domain of political economy as such. See Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, and State of Exception.
9. For example, land acquisition at Dadri, Gujarat and Kalinganagar, Orissa was at about a third and a tenth of the prevailing market rate respectively. See, for example, Praful Bidwai, ‘The Great Land Grab,’ Frontline, September 2006, http://www.tni.org/article/great-land-grab. Meanwhile the drastic and unexplained drop in exports from the domestic tariff area and the rise of claims about exports from SEZs may suggest that already existing exports are being claimed for SEZs that in fact originate elsewhere. See ‘Another SEZ Controversy’, Business Standard, editorial, July 9, 2010, 9.
10. The subject of what might be other candidates for inclusion in a list of ‘Special Political Zones’ deserves discussion; states as diverse as Bihar, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal could arguably qualify under the terms discussed here, but this is an issue beyond the scope of my paper.
11. For instance, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, in a column titled ‘Globalisation and Nationalism’ in The Hindu, February 27, 2004, argued: ‘ … [I]t can be argued that insofar as the BJP seems to be acting moderately, globalisation is a contributing factor to that moderation. … For one thing, greater integration into the world has made the BJP a little more solicitous of India's image (etc.).’ See also Sunil Jain, ‘Vote Vajpayee’, Business Standard, February 16, 2004, 11.
12. See Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics.
13. See Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life.
14. The relatively high ratio of state to non-state agency disclosed by the Tehelka ‘sting’ operation on the extensive planning and state involvement via members of Hindutva organizations, while obviously important, does not address the question of the prominence of the perception of non-state agency in the violence.
15. See Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales.
16. These figures are from Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life. Varshney himself wishes to reserve urbanity and civility from reproach, and assumes that an increase in civic ties, indexed as ‘social capital’, would deter from violence and lead to more democratic political outcomes, following Robert Putnam's argument in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Like Putnam, Varshney assumes a continuity between voluntary, and face-to-face civic life at the grassroots and overall political conditions, and like Putnam, he assumes that familial and sectarian commitments that are not public are consequently not fully voluntary, and can be excluded from consideration. These assumptions are questionable. First, like economic capital, social capital is multivalent and not a cumulative entity whose increase necessarily entails positive outcomes. Second, abstract and highly mediated relationships acquire a density and force fully capable of grounding democratic politics even in the absence of face-to-face relationships, as seen, for example, in various movements seeking alternative forms of globalization today. Third, the assumption that civic ties are located in the public, and by this reason are transparent and modern, relies on a further assumption about their separation from traditional and neo-traditional forms of association. But in postcolonial contexts, nationalist mobilization has often relied on religious association and symbolism, and hence confounded such neat divisions; the growth of organizations like the RSS, which Varshney does not consider, is itself a case in point. The RSS certainly builds on face-to-face relationships and with good reason, presents itself as community-building, but it excludes non-Hindus, and discriminates against lower castes even within its organization, while its reliance on violence is well-documented.
17. Times of India, Times News Network, ‘Riot's Impact on Trade, Industry Negligible: Govt’, March 22, 2002.
18. This ghettoization has been mainly located in the old city, although in recent years, newer settlements beyond the municipal limits in the west, and in the east; I will expand on this below.
19. Dr. V.S. Pramar, ‘A Study of Some Indo-Muslim Towns of Gujarat’, 1984. The study examines Ahmedabad, Baroda, Cambay, Palanpur, Radhanpur and Surat; except for Surat and Cambay these were all founded by Muslim rulers or under Nawabi control, and all six were ‘under strong Muslim influence’ (ibid.). The citadel which the rulers occupied were, in all these towns, as well as in other cities founded by Muslim rulers such as Delhi and Agra, located not at the center of the walled area where presumably security would be maximal, but on the periphery. Pramar suggests this was to preserve the seclusion of the women, whose privacy would be better preserved on the periphery, with one wall of the citadel looking outside rather than into the city; in each of the eight cities he considers, the citadel is located on the periphery of the walled area.
20. See Geddes’ report, titled ‘Ahmedabad’, (Part I – Walls), 1915. General Department (Comp), Files 1005-1916, Maharashtra State Archives. (See also the note by the Consulting Surveyor to the Government A.E. Mirams, dated August 25, 1915, expressing his reservation about identifying Geddes's views as those of the government. Mirams himself, in his Report on the Ahmedabad City Wall Improvement Scheme of 1919, later proposed the demolition of the walls altogether. Government of Bombay, Revenue Department (‘28’ Series), File no. 1086/28 I, pp. 323–35; File no. 1086/28 III, pp. 301–5; AMR, No. 143, 1st quarter, 1921–2, pp. 109–11, 121. Cited in Raychaudhuri, ‘Colonialism, Indigenous Elites’, 694. Geddes’ arguments were themselves in line with the City and Town Planning Exhibitions that had become an influential vehicle for inculcating urban planning as a governmental activity. Geddes visited India after Lord Pentland, the Governor of Madras, invited him to visit and enlighten municipal authorities on the subject of town planning, in 1914. The Town and City Planning Act of 1909 had been an outcome of efforts Geddes was involved in, and his City and Town Planning Exhibitions, which he designed as an educational tool, had begun to gain popularity. See Geddes, Cities in Evolution. For a discussion of Geddes’ work in relation to recent debates see Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life.
21. I return to this issue below. For a detailed historical account see Raychaudhuri, ibid., 687–703.
22. The death rate of infants under one year of age per 1000 births in Ahmedabad was 552.32 in 1904, 802.99 in 1905, 725.79 in 1907 and 976.69 in 1908. Government of Bombay, Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for the Government of Bombay, Year 1904 (Bombay, 1905), 6; Year 1905 (Bombay, 1906), 6; Year 1906 (Bombay, 1907), 5; Year 1907 (Bombay, 1908), 6; Year 1908 (Bombay, 1909), 7. Cited in Raychaudhuri, ibid., 677–726.
23. Pathak and Sheth, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. In this connection, see Raychaudhuri, ibid. Raychaudhuri's essay however dwells on the fact of indigenous elite resistance to colonial intervention; it is less clear exactly what the effects of such resistance were on the life of the city, in his account.
24. Ahmedabad Municipal Record No. 132, 2d quarter, 1918–19, 26–7, 28–32. Cited in Raychaudhuri, ibid., 693.
25. My reference here is however only to two city plan documents, cited elsewhere in this article.
26. This data is theoretically available to the public, but in practice can prove hard to obtain. Meanwhile, the population density of the walled city area is said to have reached saturation levels, and the number of persons per hectare has reduced from 716 in 1971–599 in 1981 and 560 in 1991, the most recent year for which figures are available. Over the same period, the number of persons per hectare in the western AUDA (or Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority) area has increased from 13 to 28–43, and the corresponding figures for eastern AMC have grown from 79 to 134–78. Both of these areas have concentrations of Muslim populations. CEPT/GIDB Citation2005 Ahmedabad BRTS Report no.1, cited in City Development Plan, 13.
27. Thus, for example, the number of registered workers in Ahmedabad has remained unchanged for four decades, while the population has more than doubled, and the area measured as Ahmedabad has itself grown. See in this context Breman, The Making and Unmaking of an Industrial Working Class.
28. The official picture is upbeat, however. To quote the City Development Plan of 2006–2012: ‘With its low unemployment rate, reasonably balanced income distribution, and low cost of living, the city has the reputation of LIVABLE CITY’ (sic). Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, City Development Plan, Ahmedabad, 2006–2012, 131. My thanks to Amrita Shah for leading me to this report.
29. Jagdish Parikh, Ahmedabad, January 3, 2008.
30. It is perhaps relevant to note that medieval era portraits of the city imagined a celestial eye in their effort to enfold the city pictorially, that is, a view not humanly accessible to them. Aerial photographs now surmount this difficulty as far as representation goes, but the awareness of users of space is bodily rather than visual. See in this context Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze.
31. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Chapter VII.
32. Castells, ‘Cities, the Informational Society and the Global Economy’.
33. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution.
34. Reddy et al., Report on Inquiry into the Communal Disturbances at Ahmedabad, Chapter III, Section 3.2, 22.
35. See Patel et al., ‘Rights and Wrongs’, sections 6 and 7.
36. See Simmel, ‘The Metropolis’, 1903, http://www.scribd.com/doc/8384593/Georg-Simmel-The-Metropolis-and-the-Mental-life (accessed August 28, 2010).
37. Building up from a phenomenology of everyday life, Simmel arrives at insights that clarify the structure of social relations in capitalist urbanity. There is more to this complex essay than I can explore here, hence my discussion will be limited.
38. Which comes first, it is hard to say, Simmel acknowledges, but the two cannot be separated. For an interesting and related work that traces the origin of rational discourse to the division between intellectual and manual labor in ancient Greece, see Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour.
39. Gillion, Ahmedabad, 171.
40. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars.
41. Hirschman in The Passions and the Interests has identified this as a view that originated in the early modern period, when Florentine potentates granted trading rights to merchants because such activity was seen as harmless and unthreatening to their power. As Montesquieu remarked in L'Esprit des Lois, ‘It is fortunate for men to be in a situation where, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they nevertheless have an interest in not being so.’ Cited in Amartya Sen, Foreword, Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, xxii.
42. A similar view was held by Mughal rulers, who granted European trading companies the rights they sought from the sixteenth century on, believing that traders could not constitute a challenge. By contrast, China forbade the granting of such rights to foreign merchants, and insisted that trade was an imperial prerogative.
43. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis’, 15, http://www.scribd.com/doc/8384593/Georg-Simmel-The-Metropolis-and-the-Mental-Life (accessed August 28, 2010).
44. Ibid.
45. See in this connection Veena Das's argument for interpreting violence not as an interruption to the everyday so much as, increasingly, interwoven with it, in Das, Life and Words.
46. In, 2002 however, the newer settlements outside the old city were chosen, where recent migrants to the city were more numerous, presumably because they presented softer targets.
47. Citation from Draft Development Plan, p. 9. The basic concept of town planning involved, on this account, ‘pulling together all the ownership of the area and redistributing it in a proper reconstituted form after acquiring the lands for social infrastructure and super-imposing a road-network in the area’ (p. 9). Housing and public uses of urban space (in addition to roads) were to be regulated by action against non-conforming users by acquiring their lands. However, courts ruled that the Municipal Corporation had no power to enforce ‘non-conforming’ owners to obey its injunctions. This was the case of Municipal Corporation of Ahmedabad filed Criminal Appeal No. 382/1968 against Asarwa Bobin Works, in a case decided by the Gujarat High Court on March 9, 1970, for non-conforming uses of its property, for which it had not sought permission from the AMC. In addition, the 1975 Plan proposed the acquisition of 400 acres for public housing, in addition to acquiring other lands for ‘various public purposes’ (pp. 10–1) but the Revenue Department of the state government issued a circular (No. LAQ/2269/LA/IV/20-6-1970) ordering all acquisition proceedings to cease. In Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (Town Development Department) Draft: Revised Development Plan 1975–1985. Sanctioned by Administrator under Resolution No. 1535, dated 26-12-1985.
48. Satyakam Joshi, ‘Explosion in the Laboratory’ and ‘Preparation for Violence’.
49. Sompura, ‘Residential Structure and its Evolution – A Historical Analysis of Ahmedabad City’, 68.
50. Post-plague urban policy in Bombay illustrates similar characteristics; see in this connection Hazareesingh, The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity and Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis.
51. Abdul Razaq Sheikh, May 9, 2004. Ahmedabad, Personal Interview.
52. Sompura, ‘Residential Structure and its Evolution’, 69.
53. In this respect the experience of Muslims was akin to that of the poor as a whole, though it was laden with additional layers of social stigma, to say nothing of the campaign for economic boycott against them. In 1961, 17.67% of households lived in slums. By 1971 this grew to 24.7%, by 1981, 31.82%, and by 1996–1997, to 41.1%. Sompura, ‘Residential Structure and its Evolution’, p. 83 except for the 1996–1997 figure, which is from Dutta and Batley, Urban Governance, Partnership and Poverty, 39. The figures from Dutta and Batley for 1981 do not agree with those in Sompura, however.
54. Paul, ‘Housing Policy’, 1985–90.
55. Abdul Razaq Sheikh, personal interview.
56. For example, some Muslims I encountered had taken Hindu names, and avoided any visible markers of their religious identity, while working in Hindu-owned businesses in the western part of the city. Traveling from Naroda Patia to the Satellite area once by rickshaw, my rickshaw driver, who guessed that I had never been to his area before, disclosed that similarly he had never been to mine. All along the way, he stopped at provisions stores, auto-mechanic stands, and other businesses to inquire how to proceed, and in each case he approached an establishment he believed was Muslim-owned, judging by discreet signs indicating the owners’ identity, such as a few letters written with chalk on a board, or painted on a sign. A parallel circuit lay across the city that an enterprising person could utilize, that Hindus would not necessarily know about. Fieldnotes, Ahmedabad, March–April 2004.
57. Conveyed by Keshab Das and Tara Nair, Ahmedabad, May 4, 2004.
58. This young man, whom I will call Pravin, went onto tell me that this Muslim friend and his brothers were hauled off to police custody for several days, and badly beaten there, for no fault of theirs. The family moved to Hyderabad thereafter, Pravin said. The injustice done to his friend and his friend's family, who were the only Muslims he knew, were incidental in relation to what in Pravin's mind was the essential fact, namely that Muslims as a whole were criminal. Fieldnotes, Ahmedabad, June 2004.
59. Fieldnotes, Ahmedabad, June 2004.
60. Informant name withheld. Fieldnotes, Ahmedabad, April 2004.
61. Informant name withheld. Fieldnotes, Ahmedabad, July–August 2003; January–June 2004.
62. See Feldman, ‘Ethnographic States of Emergency’, 230–2.
63. Peerzada, resident of Juhapura. Conversation on the occasion of Mohammed Arif Khan's public address in Ahmedabad, following his joining the BJP. March 23, 2004.
64. Hanif Lakdawala, medical doctor and Director, Sanchetna, personal interview, Ahmedabad, May 21, 2004.
65. Ajay Umat, News Editor, Divya Bhaskar, Personal Interview, Ahmedabad, August 2003.
66. See in this context the PhD dissertation by Rubina Jasani, submitted to the Centre for Development Studies, University of Sussex, 2007, 26.
67. We might note some revealing adjacencies with the perceptual terrain of ‘untouchability’. In the case of untouchability, it is not the personal animus that the upper caste bears against the untouchable, but the sense that he or she gains merit by acting in this way, and moreover avoids the odium of contact with a degrading body. In this sense, it is first of all an impersonal sensibility that is involved, and individual revulsion is only secondary and even incidental to the process of discrimination. If we extend this to the precarious visibility of Muslims, who emerge out of conditions of unseeability and of ghettoization to become visible in the context of anti-Muslim violence, we see that the logic governing invisibility is informal, constituting a form of common-sense: it is not the intention of the individual to avoid visual or physical contact with the stigmatized person, but rather, that an impersonal sensibility renders Muslims unfit to be seen, or repugnant.
68. Upendra Baxi, ‘Notes on Holocaustian Politics’, Seminar No. 513, 2002, http://www.india-seminar.com/2002/513/513%20upendra%20baxi.htm (accessed) May 12, 2010.
69. Baxi, ibid.
70. Achille Mbembe has undertaken the important work of exploring the character of bio-politics in the postcolonial context, but his questions gain their specific interest against the background of civil war and militarized violence in Africa. In this article, it is the perception of anti-Muslim violence as merely a regional problem, and the rationalizations by means of which such violence is then excused or condoned, that interest me. See Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. I am thinking here of scholarship exploring the relationship between sovereignty, the law of exception, and the production of ‘bare life,’ and which draws on the work of the philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. As is well known, Agamben focuses on the figure of homo sacer-the person who can be killed without compunction, that is, one who stands outside the logic of sacrifice-as illuminating the truth about sovereignty. In killing homo sacer, according to Agamben, the sovereign exhibits his right to exempt himself from the laws governing homicide, and demonstrates the capacity of sovereign violence to create a distinction between the political citizen on the one hand, and bare, biological life on the other. This logic of dehumanization, that is, the ability of sovereign power to produce disposable lives or social detritus is indeed what Agamben takes to be at the heart of genocidal politics. Here Agamben assumes a formal model of sovereignty, rather than exploring historically the contradictions through which political power is exercised, and used to produce biopolitical subjects, as I have done here. Agamben, ibid.
