Description
India, both during its struggle for independence and in the decades of freedom has been rocked by periodic episodes of communal violence, mostly taking the form of state-enabled violence, even massacres, of religious minorities. These episodes have been characterised by impunity, or the assurance that those who plan and execute these targeted communal attacks are protected from legal punishment. Scholars in the Centre for Equity Studies mapped through official records the ways in which impunity is accomplished in their book On Their Watch: Mass Violence and State Apathy in India. In this second work, Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha drill deeper into two major communal massacres, of Bhagalpur in 1989 and Gujarat in 2002. Relying not just on official papers but also on in-depth testimonies of many survivors, they systematically chart the troubling failures of India’s criminal justice system to secure justice for survivors of hate violence. Written with both rigorous scholarly insight and engaged compassion, this book is essential reading for all who care about upholding that most sacred pledge of India’s Constitution, of ensuring the equal treatment of all people, regardless of their faith, caste, gender or wealth, before the law of the land.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Mass Communal Violence in Independent India
Harsh Mander and Navsharan Singh
Part I. Warisha Farasat
Remembering the Bhagalpur Carnage
Subversion of the Justice Process
The Unhealed Wounds of Bhagalpur
Part II. Prita Jha
Remembering the Gujarat Carnage
Criminal Justice
Assessing Reparations
Acknowledgments & Index
Cover photo by Bhupinder Brar
Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha
Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha, long time human rights activists and legal experts on issues of communal genocides and rehabilitation of survivors, have given us an uncompromising book that details the aftermath of the Gujarat and Bhagalpur massacres of Muslims in independent India, and of the erosion of secularism and minority rights within the ruling establishment and in society.
The book tells it like it is… in the words and through the clearly and honestly articulated experiences of the victims and survivors, transformed into a valuable sociological and legal document through their [the authors] ability to focus on the essential contours of what constitutes a just ‘closure’ and actual justice. The book, justifiably, indicts the State and its organs, and the mainstream political leadership in the country, that has been complicit in the denial of justice. In the process, it exposes the wide gap between the equalities promised in the Constitution and the stark reality of India.
