Communal Riots in Gujarat: Examining State Power and Production of Marginality in the Attempt to Constitute the Past (Pooja Bakshi)

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 51, 19 Dec, 2015

Communal Riots in Gujarat: Examining State Power and Production of Marginality in the Attempt to Constitute the Past

Pooja Bakshi (poojabakshi9.9@gmail.com) is a research scholar at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi.

This paper analyses the exercise of state power in production of "truth" claims pertaining to the Godhra incident in 2002 in Gujarat and the riots that followed. This has been juxtaposed with an analysis of factual reportage produced by civil society actors, narratives from films, poems and an analysis of public opinion. There is much more in-depth analysis that has been done on each of these separately, but this study brings them together. It is in the coming together of insights from different sources that we can begin to see the historical event holistically. It is through this exercise that the interplay of state power and the production of marginality take place. Marginality of certain aspects of the truth as well as marginality of the Muslim community in the case need to be understood in this context.

The author is grateful to P K Datta, Ujjwal Kumar Singh, Anuradha Bakshi, Jyotsna Bhatnagar, Mehak Khanduja, an anonymous referee of this journal and CSDS Lokniti.
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