Garvi Gujarat (Pride of Gujarat): Communal Violence, Culpability and Modi-statecraft

A panel discussion with

Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director, Human Rights Watch

Biju Matthew, Campaign to Stop Funding Hate, South Asia Solidarity Initiative

Moderated by Preeti Sampat, Department of Anthropology Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center

March 15 @ 1:30 – 3.30 pm in Room: 5307

The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue @ 34th Street

“Authorities in India’s Gujarat state are subverting justice, protecting perpetrators, and intimidating those promoting accountability 10 years after the anti-Muslim riots that killed nearly 2,000 people. The state government has resisted Supreme Court orders to prosecute those responsible for the carnage and has failed to provide most survivors with compensation. Instead of prosecuting senior state and police officials implicated in the atrocities, the Gujarat authorities have engaged in denial and obstruction of justice”

(HRW 2012: http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/02/24/india-decade-gujarat-justice-incomplete).

11 years after the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat state of Western India in February 2002, controversial Chief Minister of Gujarat from the Bhartiya Janata Party, Narendra Modi is being mooted by some sections as BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate for the 2014 General Elections in India. Implicated in several reports, Modi continues to shun responsibility and gloss over the carnage of 2002 with claims of Gujarat’s development, protecting perpetrators with impunity. Join the panelists as they discuss issues of state culpability, the divisive communal politics of the Hindu-right and the Hindu-right’s continual attempts to obscure their agenda of violent injustice.   

Co-sponsored by The Committee for the Study of Religion at the CUNY Graduate Center, and The Department of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center