Normalizing violence: transitional justice and the Gujarat riots.

• Author: Kapur, Ratna
• Position: India

How does it feel to be Indian Muslim? To be constantly tom by rabid elements that your real home is across the border? (1)

In February and March of 2001, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP--World Hindu Council), a religious-based organization set up to mobilize "the Hindu masses," sounded the drum roll of the Ram Mandir (Ram Temple) movement. The primary objective of the movement is to construct a temple on the very spot in Ayodhya where the mobs of the Hindu Right tore apart a sixteenth century mosque with their bare hands in December 1992. The VHP declared that the mosque stood precisely on the spot where "God" was born and determined to carry out its objective of constructing the temple in pursuit of the broader mission of the Hindu Right, the establishment of a Hindu state for a nation consisting primarily of Hindus. (2) In preparation for the event, their foot soldiers visited the site of the now cordoned off area to pay respects and prepare for the bhumipuja (grand prayer). While some of these participants were returning from the site by train, allegedly shouting god chants, ("hail 'ram rajya"'--Hail to the Rule of Lord Ram) and anti-Muslim slogans ("Muslims Bharat chodo!"--Muslims leave India!), their bogey was purportedly set alight by mobs of Muslims as the train moved through Godhra station in Gujarat. (3) The carnage that followed left fifty-eight Hindus dead. This event ignited the second catastrophic event--the slaughter of over two thousand Muslims throughout the state of Gujarat both within sight of the state's law enforcement officers, who simply stood by as witnesses to the massacre, and, in some cases, with the active support of state officials. (4)

Dev, a Bollywood film directed by reputed filmmaker Govind Nihalani, depicts the isolation of the Indian Muslim in the post-Gujarat scenario where even secularists turned partisan, rendering the country's law and order machinery into a force capable of the most horrifying violence. At the center of the power game are two police officers--Dev Pratap Singh, (Amitabh Bachchan) and Tejinder Khosla (Om Puri). Although the film is located in Bombay, it serves as a metaphor for what happened in the Gujarat riots in 2002. Dev, the Joint Commissioner of Police, is a proud and seasoned police officer representing the liberal subject with complete faith in the supremacy of law. Dev is the conscience of the film, and has a tough time comprehending the real politics behind the riots. He is initially simply disgusted, and refuses to see how the majoritarianism of the Hindus has turned into a process of gradual disentitlement and marginalisation of the Muslims. His "neutral" stance and fence-sitting political ideology persists throughout the film, until he is attacked by a young Muslim, Farhan (Fardeen Khan), an unemployed law graduate who holds Dev responsible for his father's death. Farhan's father, Ali Saheb, was accidentally shot and killed by the police during a march protesting police injustices against the Muslim community. Ali Saheb infused Farhan with ideas of patriotism, non-violence, and faith in the democratic process and rule of law, which are the very same liberal values to which Dev subscribes, but the violent death of his father leaves Farhan emotionally orphaned and disillusioned. He chooses the path of violence and joins forces with a corrupt and ambitious politician, Lati, with the intent to kill Dev.

Unlike Dev, who goes through a process of gradual realization of the enormity of the politics behind the isolation of minorities in India, Tejinder represents a one-dimensional, almost villainous communalization. He is a boorish communal cop who throws shocking lines into the film's narrative. "They're all terrorists," claims Tejinder, who lives by his communal convictions until the very end, including at the moment of his suicide. (5)

The untangling of the complex ideological tension between the films main protagonists is set against a subtext--Bollywood's mandatory romantic interlude. A rather infantile love story unfolds during the time of the communal riots, where Farhan's attachment to the young Muslim woman next door, Aaliya (Kareena Kapoor), is celebrated through furtive glances thrown at one another from a terrace. Aaliya's role is modeled on Zaheera Sheikh, a key eyewitness in the real life Vadodara's Best Bakery Case being fought through the courts in India, which has become emblematic of the destruction and killings that took place in the Gujarat riots. (6) In what constitutes perhaps a climactic moment in the film, Aaliya, at the behest of Dev, comes forward before the police commission to expose the powerful rioters. She steps forward to reveal the names of the politicians and police officers who encouraged the rapes and murders of hundreds of Muslims, including members of her own family and friends. Aaliya's testimony represents a moment of complex subjectivity. It is not expressed exclusively through the lens of victimization, nor as a free agent exercising her freedom to complain about the violation of her individual rights. She is aware that her act is condemned by members of her own community who are convinced that no justice can be secured from a Hindu dominated structure, process, and state, and that justice can only be attained through violent revenge. At the same time, members of the Hindu Right, including the chief minister of the state (mimicking the real life staunch Hindu nationalist Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narender Singh Modi), seek to characterize her accusations, as well as Dev's efforts to bring the truth before a commission of inquiry, as further examples of appeasement of the minorities and a failure to recognize that the riots were simply an expression of anger on the part of Hindus against decades of oppression by the Muslim minority. Aaliya's complex subjectivity is constituted in and through the discourses of Hindu majoritarianism and Muslim religious identity.

The film ends with Farhan assuming his lawyerly robes to complete Dev's task of securing justice for the battered Muslim community. But Dev himself is killed by his lifelong friend Tejinder, who is unable to comprehend Dev's defense of these "traitors" and "foreigners" whose holy land lies outside of India, and whose loyalties are always suspect. Dev's murder exposes how transitional justice does not find a neat and tidy resolution in and through the establishment of a commission of inquiry and an emphasis on prosecutions. The legal, political, and religious discourses of the Hindu Right that constitute the space, location, and subjectivity of Aaliya and the entire Muslim community remain unaddressed, and continue to proliferate even after such inquiries are brought to a close.

Dev becomes the point of departure for my discussion of the large-scale riots that took place in Gujarat, a western state in India, in 2002. (7) My discussion of the riots illustrates how transitional justice cannot be limited simply to a focus on the victim subject and repair through the criminal justice process. It is about how the past informs the present and the future, and how discursive practices can themselves produce the large-scale traumas of the sort that took place in Gujarat.

Transitional justice is a term that generally refers to justice that is provided to individuals or groups during a period of transition, which usually takes the form of prosecuting perpetrators for gross human rights violations and obtaining redress for the victims of horrific crimes. (8) Historically, these mechanisms have been set up in societies that are ostensibly in transition, such as from military to democratic rule, as in Chile, or from apartheid to democratic rule, as in South Africa. In such instances, mechanisms such as truth commissions or prosecutions, as well as other forms of legal accountability and institutional reform, are set up to bring about some form of acknowledgment of the harm done--redress as well as closure. While the primary focus of transitional justice on "gross human rights violations" in the form of killings, disappearances, custodial torture, and abductions/illegal imprisonment is important, it remains "caught up in a liberal, legalistic, and state-oriented approach, despite the failures of such an approach to address the most important sources of human rights violations and anti-democratic power." (9) What this focus leaves out is how the institutional arrangements and structures may be deeply implicated in the production of the violation or the harm in the first place. It tends to draw clear straight lines between guilt and innocence, leaving a sense that the very state responsible for the violent ruptures is able to reincarnate and bring about reconciliation and repair. It achieves this by interpreting "suffering, violence, and moral violation" through a clear set of moral or legal rules in a way that enables "the identification and punishment of specific--individual or collective--perpetrators, while simultaneously protecting oneself against any implication in the violation." (10)

This Article focuses on how the Gujarat riots in the post-colonial context of India appear to fall outside the traditional assumptions and framework of transitional justice. The Article moves beyond such traditional assumptions, critically examining how injustices are normalized by demonstrating how the violence against the Muslim community, and Muslim women in particular, was partly a product of the legal, political, and religious discursive practices of the Hindu Right. The story of the Gujarat riots and subsequent efforts to address the harms and injuries through prosecution and apology does not pay attention to the institutional and discursive mechanisms within a democratic polity that can produce moments of extreme violence, moments that cannot be written off as aberrational and deviant. This Article endeavors to expose how the Gujarat riots of 2002 cannot be...