Author: Asghar Ali Engineer
Editor(s): Asghar Ali Engineer
Publisher: Orient Longman
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 467
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8125024964
Description
This compilation of important articles, interviews, investigative reports, the National Human Rights Commission’s final report and other important material has been made to provide useful material for future researchers, academics and lay readers.
The Gujarat carnage is unprecedented in the history of communal violence in Post-Independence India. Never before has such communal carnage taken place – not even before Independence. It is a cataclysmic event, a calamity of unimaginable proportions. Future generations of scholars and academics will require ample information about it. This book will provide them, if not with all, then at least with a great deal of information.
On 27 February 2002, a coach of the Sabarmati Express was torched near Godhra railway station. Fifty-eight passengers, mainly Hindu pilgrims returning from a visit to Ayodhya in support of the temple movement, were burnt to death.
With 24 hours, a conflagration of the most cruel and systematic violence against Muslims erupted and spread in a large number of cities, towns and villages in Gujarat. Thee action was unlike any previous communal violence in post-Independence India. In the months, it took for a semblance of normalcy to return to the state, apart from the natural outpouring of on the spot media reporting and analysis, several investigative teams rushed to Gujarat, conducted inquiries and published reports and other documents. Official bodies including the National Human Rights Commission (taking a direct interest for the first time, of its own accord, in communal violence) made important studies and presented them to the nation.
This book is a compilation of articles, editorials, investigative reports, surveys, memoranda and other significant material on the carnage. The final report of the National Human Rights Commission is included in it. Useful material and information will be found in it by future researchers, academics and lay readers.
As the specific events of the grim year are blurred and glossed over by other issues and by time, it is important to have such a compilation that preserves the lessons learnt in one of the most horrifying and ominous periods in India’s modern history.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Train Incident at Godhra
Articles
Editorials
Opinion
Reports
Surveys
Documentation and Interviews
Open Letter
Memoranda.