The Lesson of Gujarat, or How to Talk about Events

That the recent tragedy at Fort Hood should raise the spectre of anti-Muslim hysteria in the U.S. is by now commonplace. But the real stakes of the debate, namely the precise consequences of a certain way of thinking about events and their repercussions, are obscured by placing the focus of the debate around "how much Islam has to do with it." Framing the shootings of U.S. servicemen by this individual Hasan in the language of "terrorism" or "Islamic fundamentalism" is undoubtedly problematic. But to respond, those of us who wish to re-frame the issue are inevitably forced into a kind of obscurantist cul-de-sac that allows no discussion of Islam or Muslims whatsoever: that this is an isolated act of a "mentally unstable" person, that religion has "nothing to do with it." What we grapple with, in essence, is the singularity of the act and its relationality to a wider field of discourses, or ways of talking about things (in this case, Islam and Muslims).

Here is what I mean: whenever such events occur and are disseminated through the media, as they inevitably will in our globalised age, we should avoid the temptation of seeing them as exceptions, as acts that stand alone in the world, infinitely contingent. Instead, we should accept from the start that they will immediately feed into a vast discursive terrain of things being said, worked out and worked over, about macro-categories we are uncomfortable with, yet ignore at our peril. We should follow this event through the discursive terrain and see where it lands, and thus make visible the consequences of its particular path. The relational consequences of singular events are often so jarring that they might yet enable many (with the exception of those who are willing to pay the price), to look at the terrain anew and be made aware of the treacherous channels through which information travels and is re-directed, of how events acquire meanings.

I will use the example of the 2002 Gujarat massacres to make my point. Here, a much-disputed and yet very "real" event, the burning of 58 Hindus in a train coach in Godhra, happened in all its garish and horrifying singularity. Whether it was deliberate arson by a mob or something else, whether the categories of Hindu victims and Muslim attackers should be deconstructed, are all important yet tangential issues. Trying to disentagle religion and politics, local contexts and broad phenomena etc. etc. from the charred remains of this event, though ethical and honest in a scholarly sense, is mere impotence in the face of what happened next, when as many as 2,000 Muslims were massacred while the state not only stood by, but actively aided and encouraged the violence. A confrontation between certain individuals at a certain point in time was a spark to a fire that burned along the axes of Big categories, "Hindu" and "Muslim," all across Gujarat. In Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines, the traumatic riots in Calcutta and Dhaka of 1964, which so decisively shape the characters' lives, can be traced back to an incident in far-away Kashmir over a stolen relic. Singular events become relational to contexts far distant in time and place. If we have a truly political, indeed moral, task in our complicated world, where information travels at once faster and more insidiously than ever, it is to break the links that are formed in this way.

What would it mean to think of Godhra, minutes or hours after it happened, with the bodies of 2,000 innocent people in mind? What would it mean to follow the contention that an individual Hasan stands in for a "Muslim problem" that must be faced, to its logical conclusion, to a widespread and concerted effort by individuals and the state to "deal" with it? The consequences of thousands of lives lost when so many minds are fixed (or being fixated) onto a category, in this case of the problematic Muslim that must be dealt with, are not worth the mental leap. There are those who will say that such violence is the inevitable result, or collateral damage, of whichever side they think is to blame acting wrongly. Yes, 2,000 Muslims died, but that's because they started it. This is, I would hope, only a small minority of those who are engaged in the conversation. The task for scholars, activists, and all of us concerned about these issues is to show that the price to pay, of creating a climate for civil violence, is far more de-stabilising to the security and internal peace of communities than a singular act unavenged, or a problematic category not properly dealt with. This is especially true in the United States, where the potential for reprisals is always high yet, with almost no exceptions, since September 11th no serious and sustained civil violence has occurred. India's lessons, from the Sikh massacres of 1984 to Gujarat and on, are vital in this regard. Communal bloodshed on general lines, visited upon individuals whose only connection to singular events from another place and time lies in the relation with those events constructed in people's minds, is a price too steep to ever pay. To suppress this urge to relate the singular, to think of unrealised consequences instead of the real and visceral event that has just happened, is admittedly difficult but it is also urgent.