Notes

Preface

1. Professor Amrapali Merchant was a former vice chancellor of the Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University, honorary professor at the Gujarat National Law University (GNLU), and the president of the Gujarat Sociological Society. She unfortunately died on December 23, 2014.

2. Following an earlier research project (Rutten and Verstappen 2014) I had become acquainted with several young people in London, most of whom were Patels from villages or cities nearby Anand. When I conducted research in Anand in 2011–2012, some of them had returned to their parental home in Gujarat and we remained in contact.

3. Survey A (2011–2012) was conducted in six housing societies in Anand’s Muslim area, within walking distance of each other. They were chosen because we had access to them through personal connections; we knew that at least one household in them had a relative abroad. Research assistant Minaz Pathan conducted most of the survey, with the help of Abedaben Vahora, Sajid Vahora, and Shifa Vahora. The response rate was high: in all except three houses a resident was available and willing to answer the survey questions. All six societies surveyed were occupied solely by Muslims and mainly by middle-class residents. I lived in one of these housing societies during 2011–2012. We conducted the survey in a seventh housing society, occupied mainly by Christians, but the findings of the seventh society are not addressed in this book.

4. During my initial visits to organizations, I was often accompanied by Asif Thakor, a social worker. He helped organize a stakeholders’ event in 2012 to inform representatives of these organizations about the preliminary findings of my research.

5. I also organized a survey among Vohras in Australia, conducted by Abedaben Vahora in 2012. As I have not followed up on these links personally, however, the findings are not used here.

Introduction

1. These atrocities have been recorded in a range of reports; for example, “Compounding Injustice: The Government’s Failure to Redress Massacres in Gujarat.” Human Rights Watch 15 no. 3(C) (July 2003), http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/india0703/Gujarat-07.htm.

2. Examples of scholarship on the segregation of Muslims in Ahmedabad include Bobbio 2015, chap. 6; Chaudhury 2007; Dhattiwala 2019; Ghassem-Fachandi 2008; Jasani 2008, 2010; Mahadevia 2007; and Rajagopal 2010. For related discussions based on studies of Indian Muslims at the national level or in other cities, see Ahmad 2009; Ahmed 2019; Basant and Sharif 2010; Mistry 1992; Punathil 2018; Shaban 2012a; and Susewind 2013.

3. According to Tommaso Bobbio (2015, chap. 6), the term “ghetto,” like “slum,” does have a place in the everyday language of citizens in Ahmedabad. I have not conducted research in Ahmedabad, but when I asked a Muslim resident of the so-called ghetto of Juhapura in Ahmedabad (who visited Anand in 2017) about the term, his response was confusion. He was a talkative man (in Gujarati), and very opinionated about the segregation of Muslims in Ahmedabad (considering it worse in Ahmedabad than in Anand), but he was unfamiliar with the word “ghetto.” This chance observation raises an unanswered question as to which citizens use the term “ghetto” in Ahmedabad, and whose experiences its usage reflects.

4. In these interviews, residents also indicated that they deemed the word mohalla (used by Muslims of Zakir Nagar in Delhi; Kirmani 2013) inappropriate to describe Anand’s Muslim area.

5. For research in towns and villages in the coastal region of Kutch—where the impact of the violence in 2002 coincided with the aftermath of the 2001 earthquake—see Farhana Ibrahim (2008) and Edward Simpson (2013). I build on these works, alongside Carolyn Heitmeyer’s study of Vohras in a small town in central Gujarat (2009a), as comparative resources in this book.

6. For foundational discussions on transnationalism in migration studies, see Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Kivisto 2001; Levitt 2001; Portes 2001; and Vertovec 1999. For overview discussions on migration and development, see Bastia and Skeldon 2020; Faist, Fauser, and Kivisto 2011; and van Naerssen, Spaan, and Zoomers 2008. My approach of mapping practice and narratives of development from the perspective of overseas migrants and their acquaintances in the region of origin is inspired by ethnographically oriented work by Katy Gardner (2018) and David Mosse (2013), among others.

7. For discussions about the relations between migration and development specifically in South Asia, see Ballard 2003; Gardner 2001; Kapur 2010; Kurien 2002; Taylor, Singh, and Booth 2007; and Upadhya and Rutten 2012. These studies have explored how migration brings into being new axes of economic inequality in migrant-sending regions, or reinforces existing ones, and some have paired economic concerns with research into domains of cultural expression (e.g., Osella and Osella 2000, 2006) to reveal how migration is also paired with new dreams, styles, and social practices.

8. Part of the research for this book was conducted as a team member of the collaborative research project Provincial Globalisation, directed by Mario Rutten and Carol Upadhya. “ProGlo” was a five-year collaborative research programme of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, India, funded by the WOTRO Science for Global Development programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Netherlands, initiated in 2010. My direct colleagues were Sanam Roohi, Sulagna Mustafi, Leah Koskimaki, Puja Guha, and in Gujarat Amitah Shah and Amrapali Merchant.

9. The shifting meanings of “development” in India have been discussed by David Ludden (2005), Peter Sutoris (2016), and, in the context of “migration and development,” by Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella (2006).

10. Claims of autochthony, which seek to establish the right to belong, have come to the fore in many parts of the world. The anthropologist Peter Geschiere (2009) calls this a flip side of globalization, which often results in fierce struggles over who may be included and who excluded.

11. My household survey among 147 middle-class Muslim households in Anand town (Survey A) indicated that 66 percent of the households were Vohra.

12. I describe the perspectives of Sunni Vohras only—Daudi Bohras in Anand were a very small group of an estimated twenty-five families in 2012, and I have not interviewed them. Daudi Bohras and Sunni Vohras have the same surname but constitute separate endogamous groups without interlinked kinship ties. From what I have seen in Anand, there is very little interaction between them.

13. For examples, see Hardiman 1981; Michaelson 1979; Pocock 1972; Rutten 1995; Rutten and Patel 2003; Tambs-Lyche 1980; Simpson and Kapadia 2010; and Tilche 2016.

14. See the film Transnational Village Day (2015), by Dakxin Bajrange, Mario Rutten, and Sanderien Verstappen, Noman Movies and University of Amsterdam.

15. See the Profile of Internal Displacement: India (2002) for a compilation of the information available in the Global IDP Database of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Geneva, page 44.

Chapter 1

1. To describe locally defined regions and distinguish them from officially defined ones, Willem van Schendel (1982) uses the term “microregions,” which he borrowed from Peter Bertocci (1975, 351), who, in turn, was inspired by discussions among Bengal scholars. According to Bertocci, the term was first used in an unpublished paper by Ralph W. Nicholas.

2. The Gujarati script for the name of the community name is: ચરોતર સુન્ની વહોરા. There are different ways to transcribe the Gujarati word વહોરા into English. The spelling “Vahora” is more often used in Gujarat, the spelling “Vohra” is more often used overseas; “Vora” or “Vhora” are also found. The spelling “Bohra” seems to be the prevalent spelling in Karachi and is also used in some US families. The spelling is not considered a marker of distinction within the community, except that it can sometimes indicate one’s residential base. The spelling “Vohra” is used in academic descriptions (Heitmeyer 2009b, 2011).

3. The association is also referred to as the “Sunni Vahora Young Men’s Association,” without the prefix “Charotar” (Vahora n.d., 78–100).

4. Although the year of publication is not stated, the date of the author’s death is given: 22–10–1404 according to the Muslim calendar (July 22, 1984). The book was translated from Gujarati into English partly by Rashid Vohra in London and partly by Mayur Macwan and Monica Macwan in Anand for the purpose of this research.

5. The author explains that the name વહોરા (“Vohra,” “Vahora,” “Bohra”) has been adopted in different contexts for different reasons. It is unclear whether these disparate groups are historically related to each other or merely share a name.

6. I collected seven copies of this pamphlet, which had been distributed by the association, dated between 2005 and 2011.

7. Charotar Sunni Vahora Makeriya Samaj, Gujarat, 1986, 1996, and 2006.

8. Dewataja Samajik Ane Shaikshanik Vikas Mandal, Gujarat, Anand, 2004.

9. Website of the Muslim Vohra Association of USA, accessed July 14, 2015. The website went offline afterward, while the association was working on a new website.

10. Among Patidars this system arose after the end of the nineteenth century and aimed to promote unity and equality in the caste. This was deemed an important way of diminishing the (hypergamous) practice of marrying a daughter into a higher-status family, which is often paired with colossal financial gifts (dowry) at the time of the marriage (Pocock 1972; Tilche and Simpson 2018).

11. Among Vohras in Anand, the interest in promoting equality within the Vohra community (as compared with the Patidars’ strong focus on hierarchy) was attributed to ideals of equality in Islam. This interpretation is different from Carolyn Heitmeyer’s argument that the Vohras‘ strong focus on equality is linked to their traditional occupation as traders, as different socioeconomic strata need to be kept together within the caste to secure property and cash flow in the community (2009a, 110).

12. There were very few Muslim families in the village; two of them were Vohra. Upon consideration of David Pocock’s descriptions of the Vohras, Carolyn Heitmeyer (2009a, 75) notes that the Vohras he spoke about must have been Charotar Sunni Vohras, even though Pocock himself conflates the Vohras in the village with the urban-based Daudi Bohras. Pocock’s brief description of the shopkeepers of the village does not include references to Muslims (1972, 53).

13. For an example of a website of an overseas Patidar community, see Charotaria Leuva Patidar Seva Samaj, http://www.clpss.org, or 14Gaam.com, https://www.14gaam.com/charotar-patel-patidar-samaj.htm.

14. See also our film Transnational Village Day (2015), by Dakxin Bajrange, Mario Rutten, and Sanderien Verstappen, Noman Movies and University of Amsterdam.

Chapter 2

1. A shortened version of this statement has been published in Verstappen and Rutten 2015, 243.

2. Census of India 2001, Population by Religious Community, C-0101-24-15-0004,
Ode (M).

3. Basant Rawat. “23 Guilty in Gujarat Riot Case.” The Telegraph, April 10, 2012.

4. For sections of the judgment on the Ode case, see Akanksha Jain, “Post Godhra Ode Massacre: Guj HC Upholds Conviction of 19 Accused, 14 Gets [sic] Life Term, 3 Acquitted [Read Judgment],” Live Law, May 13, 2018 (https://www.livelaw.in/post-godhra-ode-massacre-guj-hc-upholds-conviction-of-19-accused-14-gets-life-term-3-acquitted-read-judgment/). Insofar as I have been able to retrieve the names of the victims from available reports, they had the family name “Vohra.”

5. Human Rights Watch 2002, 4. The Minister of State for Home Affairs, Sriprakash Jaiswal, estimated the post-Godhra fatalities at around one thousand: “790 Muslims, 254 Hindus Perished in Post-Godhra,” The Times of India, May 11, 2005, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/790-Muslims-254-Hindus-perished-in-post-Godhra/articleshow/1106699.cms.

6. A research report on the long-term consequences for the displaced was published as part of a series of commemoration activities in Ahmedabad ten years after the 2002 violence (Janvikas 2012).

7. The director general of police, R. B. Sreekumar, stated before the Election Commission that 151 towns and 993 villages were affected, covering 154 out of 182 assembly constituencies in the state (Varadarajan 2002, 329).

8. “Gujarat 2002: The Truth in the Words of the Men Who Did It,” Tehelka, November 3, 2007 (also see Laul 2018).

9. Sanjoy Majumder, “Narendra Modi ‘allowed’ Gujarat 2002 anti-Muslim riots,” BBC News, April 22, 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-13170914. Modi has disputed that he would have given such orders: see Manas Dasgupta, “Never Asked Police to Allow Hindus to Vent Their Anger,” The Hindu, February 24, 2012, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/never-asked-police-to-allow-hindus-to-vent-their-anger/article2925341.ece.

10. For further analysis of the rise of Hindutva ideology in India and the organizations that are associated with its history, see Tarini Bedi (2016), Thomas Blom Hansen (1999), Paul Brass (2003), and Peter van der Veer (1994).

11. Speeches of Narendra Modi and other political leaders (recorded by documentary filmmaker Rakesh Sharma) indicate they denied the violence had occurred or trivialized it. See, for example, “Film-maker releases a dozen clips of controversial Modi speeches made just after Gujarat riots,” Scroll.in, March 10, 2014, https://scroll.in/article/658119/film-maker-releases-a-dozen-clips-of-controversial-modi-speeches-made-just-after-gujarat-riots.

12. The meaning of the Zee TV interview statement has been contested, with some claiming that Modi was merely calling people to refrain from violence, as there should be “neither action nor reaction,” and others focusing on his retaliatory tone, which was maintained in other speeches that also did not explicitly condemn retaliatory violence.

13. According to a (disputed) court ruling in 2011, the fire was started by Muslims. This event is said to have sparked the anger of Hindus, which escalated into three months of attacks on Muslims as “revenge.” The image of the train appears in almost all newspaper articles, books, and reports on the subject as marking the beginning of the violence, and the word “Godhra” is often used to describe the entirety of the 2002 violence.

14. Quoted in Rowena Robinson (2005, 26) and Christophe Jaffrelot (2012, 82). (For further examples of statements by government actors, including prosecutors and police investigators, see Jaffrelot 2012, 81). Jaffrelot’s analysis is based on primary reports from government institutions, NGOs, and newspaper articles, including Janyala Sreenivas (2003), “Justice? When P in VHP Stands for Prosecution,” Indian Express, September 19.

15. This was a partial reduction, as many SIT members were drawn from local cadres. This decision was hailed by some as a victory for justice but criticized by others as a move toward acquittal, because the SIT concentrated on reaching verdicts in eight cases only.

16. Among the many newspaper articles that reported on the court proceedings was that of Basant Rawat (2012).

17. Some of the convicted people were residents of Ode. They belonged to the Patidar community. Some convicts escaped imprisonment by fleeing abroad. Natu and Rakesh Patel fled to the United States; Samir Patel was arrested in Gujarat but fled to the United Kingdom in 2009, while out on bail, and was again arrested in west London in 2016 to be sent to jail in Anand. Articles that give details about the convicts include “18 Get Life for Ode Killings,” The Indian Express, April 13, 2012; and “Gujarat Riots Accused Nabbed in London,” Ahmedabad Mirror, October 12, 2016.

18. The SIT stated that it could not find prosecutable evidence of his role in the 2002 violence. After an initial hearing, the courts did not press charges against Modi and sixty-three others due to the absence of prosecutable evidence. The BJP interpreted this as a “clean chit” for Modi, which freed him to run for national elections in 2014. In an interview with Reuters, Modi stated that he owes no explanation and is not accountable for the violence that occurred under his reign (Sruthi Gottipati and Annie Banerji, “Modi’s ‘Puppy’ Remark Triggers New Controversy Over 2002 Riots,” Reuters, July 12, 2013). For a critical comment, see Samat and Citizens for Justice and Peace (2013), “No Clean Chit for Mr. Modi.” Outlook, July 15.

19. See Raheel Dhattiwala (2018), “‘Blame It on the Mob’: How Governments Shun the Responsibility of Judicial Redress.’ The Wire, August 17.

20. For discussions on Hindu nationalism and communal violence in Gujarat, see Ward Berenschot (2011), Farhana Ibrahim (2008), Ornit Shani (2007), Edward Simpson (2013), Howard Spodek (2010), and Nikita Sud and Harald Tambs-Lyche (2011).

21. See, in particular, Ward Berenschot 2011; Jan Breman 2002, 2004; Raheel Dhattiwala 2019; Ornit Shani 2007; and Ashutosh Varshney 2002.

22. This number is derived from an interview with a resident of Anand who had been actively involved in organizing relief at the time.

23. In the village of Ode, according to one of the organizers, sixty-three houses were built through this initiative—sixty-two for Muslim families and one for a Hindu family whose house was damaged.

24. The housing societies were not built by the state, but by NGOs, community associations, and religious organizations. The Islamic Relief committee, which was one of the supporting NGOs in Anand, is said to have built 1,321 new homes and repaired an additional 4,946 damaged homes across Gujarat. See Habitat International Coalition (2014, 24).

25. Janvikas provided me with the specific data on Anand town, in addition to their published compiled report (2012). The local data show that 1,049 people resided in 205 houses in Anand’s relief societies in 2012. Other relief societies for refugees in Anand district that were surveyed in the report are in Anklav, Sojitra, Tarapur, Borsad, Khanpur, Khambhat, and Hardgud.

26. I learned about these signs from residents of Anand, although when I looked for them in 2012, nobody could tell me their whereabouts. In the same village, a journalist reports, statues of “martyrs” were erected. These were statues of men who died while looting a Muslim house because other arsonists set fire to the house (Mander 2010, 64).

27. Nutan Nagar was constructed on the former premises of the Polson dairy. The Polson Diary was established in Anand in 1930 but, in 1946, in connection with the Independence movement, farmers set up the Amul Dairy Co-Operative, a milk producers’ cooperative, to counter the low prices offered for their milk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polson_%28brand%29).

28. For further details about the development of Anand as an educational hub, see Sanderien Verstappen and Mario Rutten (2015). We established the number of colleges in 2014 through internal documents provided by the Sardar Patel University, and online searches of educational institutes and their websites.

29. Sanjeevini Lokhande’s analysis is based on interviews with BJP spokespersons and NGO workers, and on reports published by both government institutions and NGOs. An example of the “resettlement” (rather than refugee) framing is the Government of Gujarat’s report “Status Report of the Displaced Families in Gujarat with Reference to NCM Delegation Visit on 15/10/2006,” File RTI-102008-Information-18-A1, Social Justice and Empowerment Division, Sachivalay, Gandhinagar, August 2008 (in Lokhande 2015, 90).

30. For an online version of this history, see the “About” page of the website of St. Xavier’s Catholic Church, Gamdi-Anand, https://www.xavierchurchanand.com/about.

31. The Census of India (2011) indicates the majority of the population of Gamdi is Hindu, with a sizeable Christian population of 17% (table A.04).

32. Historical conversion rate as at February 1, 2001, https://www.xe.com/currencytables/?from=INR&date=2010-02-01.

33. The name Vinod Bhatt is a pseudonym. After I had introduced my research at a meeting in Anand in 2017, Vinod (a B.A. student) came up to me and volunteered to share his experiences in an interview. He thought that it was important to also discuss the movement of Hindus within the town, not just that of Muslims.

34. Tommaso Bobbio 2015, chap. 6; Christophe Jaffrelot and Charlotte Thomas 2012; Rubina Jasani 2008; and Arvind Rajagopal 2010.

Chapter 3

1. The descriptions in this chapter are based on interviews with overseas Vohras in the United Kingdom (in 2012 and 2016) and the United States (in 2015 and 2018), as well as some travel-along research among these interlocutors when they returned to Gujarat during my stays there. The most in-depth conversations were had with elderly and middle-aged men and women, who had lived overseas for several years and were British or US citizens, or permanent residents. I collected some additional data on Australia through a survey (carried out by a research assistant) among Muslims from the Charotar region, but I omitted these data from the book because I did not visit Australia myself.

2. For an analysis of these experiences of return, in comparison with the perspectives of overseas Patels, see Sanderien Verstappen and Mario Rutten (2015, 243–44).

3. Of these twenty-six families with children abroad, nineteen were recorded as being Vohra (the surname was not recorded in all households). Seventeen migrants were said to have had obtained permanent residency abroad.

4. Whereby “aliens who are the spouses and unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens and the parents of adult U.S. citizens” can apply for legal immigration, according to the Legal Immigration Preference System (Wassem 2009).

5. These estimates are based on interviews. During the 2015 Vohra Families Reunion in Delaware, 350 attendees were registered from Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other states in the United States, and four from abroad (including myself). In conversations with me, various attendees suggested estimates of the number of Vohras in the United States and Canada.

6. Mumbai has long been an important destination for migration for Gujaratis in India, including the Vohras. As early as the 1930s, the Vohras of Charotar were organizing themselves as a community in the city. In the community directory produced by the Mumbai Charotar Sunni Vohra Society in 1999, 264 Vohra households were listed as residents of Mumbai. Some used the city as a stepping-stone to destinations farther away, such as the United Kingdom or the United States.

7. In an address list produced for internal usage in the UK Vohra Community Association (accessed in 2012), 114 Vohra households are listed.

8. These young people had made use of the opportunities for students to migrate to the United Kingdom, which had opened up as a result of the liberalization and internationalization of education. For further insights into the living conditions of youth from Gujarat who migrate to the United Kingdom on student visas, I refer to my film Living Like a Common Man (Verstappen, Rutten and Makay 2011) and related article (Rutten and Verstappen 2014). Post-Brexit, young people’s interest in migration to the United Kingdom had initially dwindled, but in 2017–2018, the number of student visas and work permits granted to Indian nationals in the United Kingdom rose again (Bhattacharya 2019).

9. For an overview of research participants in the United Kingdom and United States, see table A.10. In London, I lived with a Vohra household for two months while conducting a survey (Survey B) among thirty-five Gujarati Muslims (almost all of them Vohras) living in the United Kingdom. Survey B contained closed and open questions that primarily focused on social and economic links of overseas Gujarati Muslim families with central Gujarat. The interviews took place in the homes of interlocutors in London, Leicester, Newcastle, Crawley, and Guildford. In the United States, I conducted interviews and recorded a film during a community event organized by the Vohra Association of North America (previously the Muslim Vohra Association). The footage I recorded in 2015 and 2018 resulted in a film (Everybody Needs a Tribe, 2019) and informs the analysis in this book, with some quotations included in an anonymized form.

10. Elsewhere, I have written in more detail about the donations of overseas Gujarati Muslims to initiatives, specifically in the field of education for Muslims in central Gujarat (Verstappen 2018b).

11. Elsewhere I have written about this shift in more detail (Verstappen 2005, in Dutch).

12. Pieter Friedrich, “How India’s Ruling Party Mobilizes Indian-Americans to Win Elections,” The Citizen, April 8, 2019.

13. For discussions on religious nationalism in relation to overseas Indians, see Peter van der Veer (2002), Bidisha Biswas (2010), Prema Kurien (2003), and Ingrid Therwath (2012).

14. Elsewhere I have written about this in more detail (Verstappen 2018b).

15. This multilayered perception of the state was also observed among Gujarati Muslims in Ahmedabad by Rubina Jasani (2011).

16. Theodore Schleifer, “Donald Trump: ‘I think Islam Hates Us,’” CNN, March 10, 2016 (https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/09/politics/donald-trump-islam-hates-us).

17. “Donald Trump says ‘I love Hindu’, Promises Closer Links to India if Elected,” The Telegraph, October 16, 2016 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/16/donald-trump-promises-closer-links-to-india-if-elected/).

18. “Raveesh Kumar, official spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs in the Government of India, quoted in Sriram Lakshman (2019), “U.S. Report on Religious Freedom Notes Mob Attacks in India.” The Hindu, June 22. For an earlier example, see Kallol Bhattacherjee (2016), “Religious Intolerance is ‘Aberration’, India tells the US.” The Hindu, February 29.”

19. My research has focused on the first generation. When I talked with members of the second generation, often briefly before or after the interviews with their parents, they shared experiences of discrimination in the British labor market or at school and suggested that Muslims around the world were under pressure.

20. Within assimilationist interpretations of integration, efforts to forge transnational relations with the homeland have often been regarded as a desire to separate oneself from the dominant society; however, transnational scholars argue that transnationalism can be an essential aspect of the integration process (for a discussion, see Cağlar 2006, 2–3; Kivisto 2001). Migration scholars have demonstrated that it is often the more established migrants—those who have lived abroad for a long time—who are most active in forging transnational networks (Portes, Haller, and Guarnizo 2002) and migrant associations (Portes, Escobar, and Radford 2007, 276). Moreover, in countries such as the United Kingdom, the integration of migrants into the dominant society has been linked to attempts to organize people as ethnic or religious groups (Baumann 2003, 46–47).

21. While migration policies have become stringent in the United Kingdom, short-term family visitor visas for a maximum duration of six months have remained accessible to families who can support their relatives for the duration of their stay.

22. Rangin Tripathy, “So far, OCI card holders have enjoyed benefits. With CAA, India has put a price on the scheme,” Scroll.in, June 6, 2020.

23. Almeida, Albertina. 2020. “The CAA’s Provision for Cancelling OCI Is Aimed at Punishing Dissenters.” The Wire, April 25.

24. For a more detailed description and analysis of this case study, see Sanderien Verstappen (2017).

25. For further discussions on land and real estate investments, see, among others, C. Ramachandraiah (2016), Llerena Searle (2016), and Michael Levien (2018).

Chapter 4

1. This record was established by a research assistant who went around Anand town on a motorcycle in 2012 and asked about all the mosques he knew of. In addition to the mosques, two dargahs were counted. Shia mosques were not taken into account.

2. In a previous version of this case study, I had anonymized Vasim and called him “Javed.” In 2017, I gave him the story I had written about our encounters, and he read it. He thought I had represented him well, and positively—more positively even than what he thought of himself—and asked me to use his real name (Vasim) in future publications.

3. Both men and women travel. Men more often do so for economically dispersed activities, and women do so more often to maintain relations with kin. For a further description of female mobility, see chapter 1.

4. For scholarship about madrassas in India, see Arshad Alam (2011), Usha Sanyal and Sumbul Farah (2018), Robert Hefner and Muhammad Zaman (2007), and Ebrahim Moosa (2015).

5. This is somewhat different from findings in Andhra Pradesh (Mustafi 2013) and Kerala (F. Osella and C. Osella 2009).

6. The association of education with religious groups is a social consequence of the privatization of educational institutes. Gujarat has a long tradition of private participation in education, driven by philanthropic and civil society motives. The privatization of education after the 2000s, however, increased the influence of private organizations in educational institutes. Simultaneously, private education turned into a money-making endeavor, with private institutes demanding high monthly fees and additional “donations” at the time of enrolment (Iyengar 2012). These developments have created a three-tier system, where the poor are dependent on poorly functioning government schools, the middle classes prefer private colleges, and the wealthy elites have monopolized exclusive forms of education in metropolitan cities. It is in the private colleges—which the children of middle-class families attend—that caste and community groups have become prominent organizers. This is clearly visible in Anand’s educational landscape.

7. For a discussion of the difficulty of answering such questions, see Kirmani (2013, 134–35).

8. During 2011 and 2012, I frequently visited the school as part of my effort to get to know the neighborhood. This primary school, financed and organized by Muslims, was one of the eight self-funded trusts in which I conducted interviews in Anand. The activities of these trusts included running primary schools, hospitals, and charitable initiatives to distribute allowances to poor, sick, or widowed Muslims.

9. Government-aided private schools are a form of public-private partnership in which the school management is left to private actors, in this case a Christian trust, while partial government support is provided. The salary of the teachers is fixed by the same regulations that govern public schools that are fully funded by the government.

10. The historical conversions rates used in this chapter are established on February 1, 2012.

Conclusion

1. Some of these conclusions have also been presented in my articles (Verstappen 2017, 2018a).

2. For previous discussions of small-town India, see, among others, Binod Agrawal (1971), Lauren Corwin (1977), F. M. Dahlberg (1974), Lalta Prasad (1985), and P. Rana and G. Krishan (1981).

3. The task of fact-checking and analyzing where stereotypes and biases come from have been taken up by many other scholars of Gujarat. My book has been a different kind of response, inspired by those in Anand who mostly ignore prevalent stereotypes and develop their own ways of understanding and discussing their daily problems.

4. Others have discussed the social and psychological processes through which people contemplate violence and violence-induced displacement (Appadurai 2006; Arendt 1962; Das 2007; Malkki 1992).