There was a faint chill of approaching winter as I got into a taxi late one night two years ago. Tehelka, the newsmagazine I work with, had just broken a major investigation. It was an hour past midnight. The airwaves were still crackling with the amplifying shames of the story as television anchors quizzed a conveyor belt of public figures on its implications.
In February 2002, 59 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya – the symbolically surcharged birthplace of Lord Ram – had been burnt alive in a train by a Muslim mob in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Over the next week, retaliatory Hindu mobs hacked and burned 2,500 Muslims across the state. As the world watched in shock, an impenitent government led by the rightwing Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) put out smart theories about ‘action and spontaneous reaction’ – Hindu retaliation for Muslim crime – and refused to apologize.
