Memories of the Violence

Gujarat, March 1, 2002. On the rooftop of a three-story house in the village of Ode, a group of neighbors gathers after being chased out of their own houses minutes before. A mob of an estimated 1,500 men roam the village carrying sticks, knives, and kerosene bottles, setting properties on fire. The village has a population of 18,459 people, of whom 16,707 are Hindus, 1,131 are Muslims, and 466 are Christians,2 but only the houses of Muslims are targeted by the mob. Slogans fill the air: “Kill the Muslims!” The rooftop where the escaped Muslims have been gathering turns into a trap when the attackers lock the house from the outside and throw burning rags, kerosene, and gasoline into it. Twenty-three people die in the resulting fire, including nine women and nine children.3 Six escape by jumping off the roof.4

On another rooftop in Anand, approximately twenty-five kilometers away from the village of Ode, a twelve-year-old Muslim girl tries to calm herself. She has heard about Ode. In Anand, there is a curfew; schools and shops are closed, and her whole family has gathered at home. In front of their housing society, her father and uncles stand guard with the other men. On the rooftop, the women are preparing buckets of marchi water (water boiled with chilies). If mobs will come to their house, the buckets will be thrown at them from the roof.

In 2002, the rooftops of Gujarati houses became watchtowers and places for sociality and security. Some rooftops, however, became death traps. What differentiated a watchtower from a death trap was its location. In Ode, people jumped from the roof to escape the fire. In Anand, the marchi water was prepared but never thrown—the expected mobs didn’t come. Eventually, the residents of Anand and Ode met at Anand, where the refugees were housed in makeshift camps in the community grounds of residential neighborhoods (spaces normally used for weddings and games of cricket).

In the years after 2002, people came to terms with the knowledge that some places had been safer than others during the violence. Some villages now appeared as potentially dangerous places for their Muslim residents, while parts of Anand seemed relatively safe and desirable places to live. These spatial reimaginations, in terms of a safe/unsafe division, were enacted and consolidated in the years after 2002. With the reasonable expectation that the mobs could return, in the knowledge that neither fences nor locks would withstand fire, and having learned the hard way that the state would not protect them against communal violence, many Muslims asked themselves, “Where will we be safe if the mobs come again?” For many, answering that question involved moving. Some Muslims moved within Anand, shifting from a Hindu-majority area to a part of Anand where Muslims were in a majority; others came to Anand from nearby towns and villages. Hindus and Christians also moved within the town, away from the spaces that were now becoming marked as “Muslim,” and into housing societies where the majority of residents were Hindu or Christian.

Residents estimate that between 2002 and 2012, the number of Muslims in Anand town doubled, which is confirmed by the Census of India (25,099 in 2001; 45,932 in 2011). In the Anand district as a whole, there was a striking transformation in the ratios of Hindus and Muslims between 2001 and 2011 (according to the census records; see table A.01). In 2001, the majority of the Muslim population in the district (52 percent) lived in rural areas; by 2011, however, the majority (56 percent) resided in urban areas, while only 44 percent of Muslims remained in rural areas. This change in the rural-urban distribution of the Muslim population within a decade cannot be explained by general urbanization patterns alone. (By comparison, the percentage of Hindus living in rural areas of the district during the same decade decreased by 2 percent). The change can be attributed to the fact that many local Muslims living in nearby villages moved to Muslim-majority areas in Anand town in the intervening years. Through countless relocations, often only over a few kilometers, Hindu-rural and Muslim-urban spaces had been demarcated.

Anand’s northeastern outskirts, where many Muslims settled, expanded in these years; new housing societies, schools, roads—and, increasingly, also shopping centers, restaurants, and a cinema—were built. Land prices rose, and a flurry of real-estate developers arrived to build new housing societies on formerly agricultural land. The number of mosques in the town doubled. Before 2002, there were twenty-five mosques; in 2012, there were fifty-one. The extended stretch of new housing societies and mosques that emerged from this is referred to by Muslims as amara vistar (our area). A Muslim shopkeeper jokingly referred to it as New Anand.

The residents attribute the spectacular expansion of the built environment since 2002 primarily to the arrival of Muslims from nearby villages. This was confirmed in a survey of respondents’ prior locations of residence and dates of arrival (part of Survey A, in a housing society of fifty households). The majority (twenty-nine) of these households had moved to Anand in the previous ten years. Ten had resided in Anand between eleven and twenty years, and eleven for more than twenty years. Respondents provided the name of the hometown (vatan) of the male head of household and also the hometown (pir) of his wife, revealing that the vast majority of towns and villages in which husbands and wives had lived prior to coming to Anand were located within Anand or Kheda district.

Anand has been a key site of arrival for Muslims in central Gujarat for two reasons: first, to seek safety in the aftermath of the 2002 violence; and second, to achieve upward mobility through urban livelihoods and lifestyles. The first process has been prominently discussed in existing scholarship in Gujarat. My data confirm the existing analysis of segregation in the aftermath of violence and show that residential segregation occurs not in only cities, but in rural settings as well.

Pogroms

Countless books and reports describe how anti-Muslim violence spread across the state of Gujarat between February and May 2002, with occasional killings taking place until December of that year. The violence resulted in the estimated death of 2,000 people, most of whom were Muslims.5 An estimated 20,000 Muslim homes and businesses were destroyed through targeted burning and looting, and an estimated 360 places of worship were demolished. At least 150 to 200 Muslim women were raped, gang-raped, or mutilated, and many of them were burnt afterward in order to obliterate the evidence (Kumar 2016). The violence displaced more than 200,000 people.6 A distinct feature of the violence—as compared with earlier instances of violence in the state in 1969 and 1985, which had been mostly restricted to the city of Ahmedabad—was that it had been widespread in rural parts of the state, affecting a total of 151 towns and 993 villages.7 The Ode massacre was one of nineteen violent events that were recorded in the rural district of Anand (table A.06).

Anti-Muslim violence has a distinct history in India. In 1947, when colonial British India was granted independence, and the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan, large-scale violence against religious minorities broke out in both countries—against Hindus in the new territory of Pakistan, and against Muslims in the newly independent India—with an estimated death toll of between two hundred thousand and two million. After independence, communal violence recurrently surfaced, with a major episode in Ahmedabad in Gujarat in 1969, and rising violence on the basis of religious identity after the 1980s (Wilkinson 2008). In the context of Gujarat’s 2002 violence, scholars use the term “pogroms” to highlight the organized and one-sided nature of the violence targeting Muslims. The reports of journalists, nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers, and scholarly researchers who have interviewed perpetrators, victims, and eyewitnesses8 demonstrate that the violence was well organized, and that those responsible for law and order instructed the police not to intervene. The police stood by, or sometimes even provided assistance, when well-armed mobs attacked (Human Rights Watch 2002).9

The violence was organized and legitimized by organizations directly or indirectly affiliated with the Sangh Parivar, a group of organizations that includes the BJP (the political party that was in power during the 2002 violence), the VHP, the RSS, and Bajrang Dal. The Sangh Parivar organizations promote the Hindutva ideology—Hindutva is translated by some as “Hindu fascism,” and by others, more euphemistically, as “Hindu nationalism.”10 According to Hindutva ideology, there is one, unified version of Hinduism, which is linked to specific understandings of nation (India as “Hindu nation”), race (“Hindu blood” as superior to others), land (“Bharat Mata,” the embodiment of “Mother India” as a Hindu goddess) and culture (promoting cultural practices associated with the upper castes). The ideology was developed in the 1920s by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and has been propagated through Sangh Parivar organizations through campaigns, speeches, and pamphlets (Bhatt 2001).

Whether the attackers of 2002 actually believed in the Hindutva ideology is debatable. No doubt some did, but scholars of Gujarat have also explored other explanations. In particular, the growing economic insecurities resulting from Gujarat’s (neo)liberal economic policies made people greatly dependent on political organizations, such as those associated with the Sangh Parivar, for access to state services and other forms of security (Berenschot 2011). As these organizations had the capacity to help citizens gain access to state services such as health care and education, they could ask for something in return, including the citizen’s participation in violence to divide the electorate along religious lines. The 2002 violence occurred in the run-up to the Gujarat state election and targeted only those voting localities or wards where the BJP party faced the greatest electoral competition. The BJP won the state elections with an absolute majority, and its vote share increased the most in the districts where the violence was worst (Dhattiwala and Biggs 2012, 504).

These descriptions and explanations are by now well established in the corpus of academic literature; however, they are not accepted by the politicians under whose watch the violence unfolded. Although police officers, prosecutors, and leaders of violent groups have unapologetically admitted to their complicity, some even to the point of boasting about it, the political rationale for the violence has not been formally admitted. In public statements, leading BJP politicians have denied that the violence occurred, framed it as trivial, or justified it as a natural and inevitable expression of innate and inherently antagonistic cultural identities.11 They describe the events of 2002 as two opposing religious communities clashing, rather than as an organized attack on a minority. They continue to prefer the term “riots” to “anti-Muslim pogroms” to describe the violence, and have invested a great deal of effort in writing histories to legitimize their version of the events. According to the “riot” narrative, the attacks on Muslims were a “reaction” to an “action”—as suggested, for example, in an interview with Zee TV by the then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.12 The “action” was setting a train on fire at Godhra Station on February 27, in which fifty-nine Hindus died.13

In the years following 2002, NGOs, lawyers, victims, and eyewitnesses have worked to bring cases of violence to court. Convictions and charges have been rare, however, because investigators and prosecutors have stalled or obstructed legal processes through acts of nonrecording, intimidation, and bribery, and even by destroying evidence. Some investigators have justified these strategies by suggesting that it is natural for them to protect the state government by preventing convictions. By 2008, when only a handful of attackers had been prosecuted, the judges of the Supreme Court warned that “the [state] court was acting merely as an onlooker and there is no fair trial at all,” so that “justice becomes the victim.”14 To reduce the influence of Gujarati state institutions15 it installed a new legal body, the Special Investigation Team (SIT), to rule on eight cases.

The massacre in the village of Ode was one of the cases brought to court through the SIT. On April 9, 2012, ten years after the attack, a verdict was reached in the Anand District Court. Of the forty-six people accused, twenty-three were found guilty,16 and of these, eighteen were sentenced to life imprisonment, and five were sentenced to seven years in prison. In 2018, the High Court of Gujarat acquitted three of those sentenced to life imprisonment; a fourth convict died in prison during the pendency of the appeal. Considering that, according to testimonies, the mob consisted of an estimated one thousand to two thousand attackers, the eventual conviction of nineteen attackers can hardly be regarded as the delivery of justice. Moreover, those convicted were only those who were identified by eyewitnesses as perpetrators;17 they were not the masterminds in the background who planned the events, sent in the mobs, or organized the weapons and logistics.

In the meantime, Narendra Modi, who had been chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 and thus was politically responsible for law and order at the time, moved to the national stage and became the prime minister of India in 2014.18 His election campaign focused on development and he promised to implement Gujarat’s neoliberal model of development on a national scale. This economic agenda won broad popular support, and the political party he represented (the BJP) won enough seats to form a single-party government. In the years after 2014, the BJP carried out its development agenda. It also appointed members of boards and committees that revise history books and restructure educational curricula so that they were aligned with its majoritarian Hindu nationalist agenda, and designed new policies of direct and indirect censorship to curb opposition. Soon, the promise of development became overshadowed by news reports on mob lynchings around the country, mostly directed at Muslims and Dalits involved in the meat trade and conducted in the name of Hindu vegetarianism and the protection of cows.

Many Indians were shocked by the targeted attacks on Muslims and Dalits in these years, and citizens groups in cities such as Mumbai and Bangalore expressed their concern through #NotInMyName protests. Politicians, however, attributed them to “spontaneous emotional outbursts,” and the individual perpetrators and the groups directly or indirectly associated with them (such as holy cow protection committees) have rarely been convicted or prosecuted, signaling that the ruling government tacitly approved of the attacks.19 In 2019, Modi’s BJP government was re-elected with an absolute majority. If debates about Indian democracy have long centered on the emergence of “Hindu nationalist” ideologies,20 since 2014 a growing number of commentators have preferred the term “fascism” (Banaji 2013) to explain developments in the country—although some of those who have dared to do this have been arrested.

These developments and discussions form an important context for the developments in Anand in the years after 2002. Considering the wealth of eyewitness accounts that are available in the research reports, newspaper articles, and legal proceedings quoted above, I have not focused this study specifically on individuals who witnessed or survived violence in 2002. I conducted the research several years afterward (between 2010 and 2017), and I did not think it was necessary to seek out traumatized individuals and ask them to relive their experiences (similar to Kumar 2016). The research focused on a town where very little violence happened in 2002, and included many people who never saw this violence. Yet even they considered 2002 a watershed moment.

The Mobs That Didn’t Come

In 2002, most of Anand’s Muslims waited for a mob that never came. As a result, their memories of the period were mostly uneventful yet anxious, narrated to me in terms like this: “All the people in our neighborhood locked their houses from the inside and went to the rooftop. All the women in my family were on the terrace.” Or: “Everybody did not sleep. They were waiting in their houses. If something would happen, they were ready to fight.” And: “We were in our houses, awake all night. Sometimes we [the women of different families] would gather in one house together.” And even: “We had fun, that time,” smiling at the surprise on my face, sketching a lively scene of women chatting, men staying nearby the house, and children playing till late at night.

Some mobs did come to Anand. They attacked Muslims in the Hindu-majority parts of the town, in the Vallabh Vidyanagar campus area, where a Muslim student hostel was ransacked, and on some of the main roads and markets, where Muslim-owned shops and garages were looted. One stabbing on March 27 in Anand was recorded (in The Times of India; table A.05)—insofar as residents recognized this incident when I asked about it, they thought the person stabbed was probably a Hindu.

My research did not investigate why Anand remained relatively safe in comparison with other places in the vicinity. In this, it is different from the majority of studies on communal violence in Gujarat, which have focused on explaining its causes.21 Yet, to understand how Muslims of the region responded to the violence in the way they did—by relocating to Anand—I did ask them how they themselves explained Anand’s relative safety. The most common answer linked numerical strength to physical strength. One man explained, “Anand is safe because so many Muslims are in Anand. We are one group, a big group. The railway station and bus stop are ours. If there are any difficulties, we are safe here.” A woman added, “We are strong here. Hindus know that Muslims will fight back if they are attacked.” A young woman said, “We are safe here. Because on that side [pointing left] there are the butchers. On the other side [pointing right] there is Ismail Nagar. So nothing can harm us.” When I asked why the presence of a butcher street made the area safe, she clarified: “They have knives. People don’t dare to pass.”

The reference to Ismail Nagar was not clarified in this conversation because the narrator assumed it was evident. Indeed, the story goes that Ismail Nagar is a dangerous place where people have sticks, possibly knives, and are ready to pick a fight if so required. A young man residing in the adjacent housing society of Nutan Nagar explained how, in 2002, he saw Muslim men of Ismail Nagar patrol the area. They were angry, because “Hindu people were beating Muslim people at the village.” When the police arrived on this scene, the residents prevented them from entering Ismail Nagar by throwing stones. When the police used tear gas to disperse them, the residents retaliated by attacking the police van. The police, so the story goes, withdrew. According to this local narrator, the resistance put up by the residents made Ismail Nagar notorious even among the “people in Delhi,” referring to the government. Its notorious character was confirmed in some of my encounters with local Hindus, who did not know the exact whereabouts of the Ismail Nagar housing society and had never seen it, yet were horror-struck with the idea that I would visit it: “Even the police don’t dare to enter Ismail Nagar!” For Muslims, on the other hand, it is precisely because outsiders fear entering it that it has become a possible source of protection in the absence of state protection against violence.

These local explanations why Anand was safe, as put forward by the residents, align with a hypothesis suggested by Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot (2012), that there was “safety in numbers,” and by Raheel Dhattiwala (2019), that the mobs of 2002 avoided areas where they would be at risk of being outnumbered in the case of a possible counterattack. Some residents also spoke of the alliances between Muslims and Hindus that had existed in the town (for example, between Vohra and Sindhi traders in the marketplace)—an explanation along the lines proposed by Ashutosh Varshney (2002), that cross-community civic relations were a peacekeeping mechanism. These assertions that there were good relations do not contest the notion that Muslims were protected by their numerical dominance in certain parts of Anand.

Muslims in Anand live with the knowledge that there were remarkable differences in the spatial patterning of the violence against them, and they explain these differences in terms of their numerical strength in certain localities. The logical consequence of this has been relocation: relocation from Hindu-majority into Muslim-majority areas of the town, and from Hindu-majority villages into the parts of Anand where Muslims are in a majority.

The Arrival of the Refugees

In 2002, hundreds of refugees arrived in Anand, swelling into the thousands. The refugees were Muslims from forty-six villages22 in the surrounding region. Some found shelter on the rooftops of relatives’ homes, others were accommodated in mosques, community halls, and the three refugee camps that were set up on the community grounds around the housing societies of Nutan Nagar and Ismail Nagar.

When the state government announced the closure of refugee camps in Gujarat in July and October 2002 (Human Rights Watch 2003), Muslim leaders in Anand started rehabilitation plans that aimed to rebuild and repair the damaged houses in the refugees’ villages of origin.23 Besides material support in the form of housing and to (re)start businesses, they tried to mediate between refugees and village leaders to help guarantee them a safe return and to help Muslims reclaim the village as a shared space. Despite these efforts, however, many refugees stayed on in the now-closed camps (see also Habitat International Coalition 2014).

To accommodate the refugees who remained, eight relief societies were built in Anand.24 They contained 205 houses for approximately one thousand people.25 One of these housing colonies was named Mogri-Sisva—as a way of remembering the stories of the refugees from the villages of Mogri and Sisva, who were not able to return in safety. In the village of Mogri, just south of Anand’s Vallabh Vidyanagar, signs had appeared in 2002 announcing that Mogri was a “Hindu village” in a “Hindu rashtra” (country).26

The relocation of Muslims into Anand was not over when the refugees had been settled. In the decade after 2002, people kept arriving. The assumption that drove much of these rural-urban relocations was the idea that the urban neighborhood, and the people who inhabit it, were a protection against violence. People who faced financial loss after (part of) their properties in the villages were destroyed waited until they gathered enough financial resources to invest in a house in Anand. Some villagers moved to Anand by living with relatives for a few years, then finding their own houses in the town. In the initial years, people were able to buy houses at discount prices because Hindus, in their hurry to move out of the areas where Muslims arrived, sold their houses below the market value. As time moved on, land and housing prices rose. As a result, many people took loans, some sold their properties in their home villages, and others pooled their income to buy or rent a house in Anand. The violence, however, does not fully explain the overall long-term trend of Muslim settlement in Anand; there were additional reasons for these moves.

Urbanization

Some newly arriving families were not directly affected by the pogroms, but were interested in moving to town for other reasons—for example, because they were tempted to invest in the newly developing housing societies, with their spacious, freestanding two- or three-story houses (figure 2.01) in the vicinity of desirable facilities. To explain these arrivals, it is necessary to also take into account the broader history of urban development in Anand, its distinctive role as a regional center for education and the urban professions, and the economic opportunities for Muslims in the town. Consider the following statements collected from a 2012 interview with three elderly Muslim men, all long-term residents of Anand town. The question I had posed was: “Why did Muslims come to Anand?”

The main reason why people came to Anand is that they suffered lots in riots. That’s why the people can’t live in villages; so they transferred here to Anand.

They came [here] because they can easily go to work, easily travel, and easily get religious education.

Education. That’s what Anand was selected for. Education and business purpose, no other. And for our religion. How are you going to get religious education in the village?

The pursuit of better employment, business, and education opportunities are additional reasons for the relocations of Muslims, beyond the safety concerns that followed the 2002 violence. These rural-urban relocations are also associated with the adoption of suburban lifestyles, enhanced mobility, and religious education of an incipient middle class of Muslims.

Anand has long been a market town and a regional hub for manufacturing and secondary education. It has recently become an administrative center to which residents of the wider Anand district travel to visit offices and attend court. Its growth has been gradual but significant. In the 1950s, Anand was still the size of a village, with a population of 25,767 residents (Thakar 1954). By 1962, the town had grown to an estimated 40,000 residents. Thereafter, according to census data, the population kept growing gradually, to 83,936 in 1981 and to 198,282 in 2011. As the town grew, it turned into a sprawling urban conglomerate that now includes several adjoining villages and various newly developed residential and commercial areas. This “Urban Agglomerate Anand,” as it is referred to in the census, had a population of 288,095 in 2011. (For an overview of the town’s growth since 1991, see table A.06).

By the 1950s, some Muslim families were living in Anand (Thakar 1954). Some lived in the old town among Brahmins, Patidars, Ksatryas, Rabari, and artisans; others lived in a small area called Azad Chowk; and in western Anand, there was a mosque. From the 1960s, more Muslims began to settle in the town. Two housing societies were established specifically for Muslims in the 1960s: Nutan Nagar and Ismail Nagar. These housing societies were established by local Muslim entrepreneurs (Nutan Nagar between 1959 and 1963;27 Ismail Nagar after 1969) near a large madrassa that had been established in the 1920s, on the northeastern outskirts of Anand, between Anand town and the adjacent village of Gamdi. In the period between 1991 and 2001, the percentage of Muslims in the town’s population rose from 13 to 16 percent (Census of India 1991, 2001). After 2002, the area surrounding Nutan Nagar and Ismail Nagar developed further and is a still-growing Muslim area.

Besides the violence, five additional factors contributed to the relocation of Muslims and Anand’s urban growth: commerce, industrialization, education, the arrival of government offices, and transportation infrastructure. First, towns like Anand, Nadiad, and Borsad are typical examples of market towns where traders sell produce from local markets and villagers do their shopping. Anand has many shopping centers, and Muslims are quite visible across the town in their roles as shopkeepers, businessmen, tailors, and mechanics. In a survey in Anand’s commercial center near the railway station (referred to by townspeople as “Supermarket”), it was established that sixty-five of a sample of a hundred shopkeepers on the ground floor were Muslim (most of them Vohra; the Hindu shopkeepers were Sindhi and Punjabi; see table A.07). Muslims are also prominent in the blossoming textile trade in the town. They are particularly busy in December, when many overseas Indians visit the region to stock up on dresses and kurtas.

Second, Anand saw the arrival of industries with the establishment of the Amul Dairy Co-Operative in 1946, the large-scale industrial enterprise Elecon in 1960, and the Vitthal Udyognagar Industrial Estate in 1965. These and other industries have been established mostly by entrepreneurs from Hindu castes, but they have also attracted Muslims to Anand for employment as mechanics, welders, electricians, and managers, and a few are factory owners themselves. Beside offering employment, these industries also attract related services such as financial services, shops and workshops, and transport companies.

Third, an important reason why Anand gained prominence in the region, and certainly also for Muslims, is its role as a regional center for education. The township of Vallabh Vidyanagar, connected to Anand by the Anand-Vidyanagar Road, is an education town. It started with the establishment of Sardar Patel University in 1955 (Merchant 1999). The oft-narrated history of this university highlights the role of the farmers of Karamsad village, who donated the land on which the university campus was built, and memorializes engineer Bhaikaka as the mastermind behind the planning of the campus. Following the establishment of this university, thousands of rural youth started commuting to Vallabh Vidyanagar by local bus or sought residence in its multiple student hostels. Since 2000, following the privatization of education, Gujarat has seen a rapid increase in the number of private educational institutions across the state (Iyengar 2012), and the public Sardar Patel University is now complemented by schools and colleges managed by commercial enterprises or community-based associations. As of 2014, more than 125 secondary and high schools were located in Anand-Vidyanagar and its surrounding villages, and Sardar Patel University alone had more than 25,000 students spread over twenty-six departments and eighty-seven affiliated colleges.28 The educational institutes of Vallabh Vidyanagar were a big pull for Muslims who wished to send their children for higher education. Some Muslims also work as teachers in educational institutions.

Fourth, the town’s growth has been shaped by a 1997 administrative reshuffling, when Kheda was divided into two separate districts—Anand and Kheda districts—and Anand town became the capital of the newly established Anand district. Government offices arrived, as well as a host of private businesses catering to the expanding public sector. For educated rural youth, the prospect of obtaining jobs in this public sector has great appeal. In the early 1990s, when the Gujarat state economy underwent a process of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation (Hirway 2012a, 2012b), secure employment became rare in the region overall.

Finally, Muslims in Anand have an occupational niche in the transportation sector, as evidenced by the trucks, taxis, and rickshaws that are parked in front of their houses. Anand’s position as a central transportation hub in the region has a long history, starting with the colonial government’s decision to create a train station in Anand. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Gujarat state invested in infrastructure development, which brought a new city-to-city expressway connecting Anand to Vadodara and Ahmedabad, a national highway linking Anand to Mumbai and Delhi, and a rural road network linking the town to the villages. Buses provide public transportation along these roads. What is more, a fine-grained network of shared auto-rickshaws provides affordable connections within the town and to the surrounding villages, plying back and forth along the same route with four or five passengers at a time, and are a very common mode of local transportation here. Muslims operate in this blossoming transportation sector as auto drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, mechanics, garage owners, and driving teachers, and by building and trading vehicles.

In comparison with descriptions of Vohras in the smaller town of Sultanpur (Heitmeyer 2009a, 2009b), my findings point toward a shift in occupational orientation, in which the rural-urban transition was paired with a new emphasis on education and white-collar employment. In Sultanpur, Vohras have regarded themselves as a trading community, strongly oriented toward commerce and self-employment and placing less emphasis on formal education. While business is also important in Anand, the interest in formal education is high, and some families derive their income and status from employment in government offices. In the housing society in which I lived, six of twenty-two heads of household indicated that they were employed as professionals in white-collar work (as a bank employee, tax officer, clerk, advocate, teacher, and professor at a government-funded school). There were also six businessmen, two engineers, two drivers, a mechanic, an electrician, and a farmer (table A.08). Many young people aspired to “service,” indicating salaried and secure (i.e., white-collar) employment in offices, and their parents encouraged them to study so that they could pursue these aspirations.

The Makeriya marriage circle in the Vohra community, for example, places much emphasis on this trajectory of education. In Anand, the Makeriya members are described as families without traditional capital, who have made economic progress through education and government employment in the town. In conversations about them, some of my neighbors pointed toward a competition between the families of the Makeriya and Arsad marriage circles on the one hand, and the traditionally more privileged Chaud marriage circle on the other. The less-privileged sections of the Vohra community have been surpassing Chaud families in status and wealth, which could be an impetus for Chaud families to follow their example and start investing in education, too. Business-oriented Chaud families in Anand may hold onto family-owned land and property in their villages of origin, but they also use facilities in town to access education and new kinds of urban occupations, and potentially, international migration.

Leaving the Village

The trend of leaving the village is not limited to Muslims. Throughout rural India, scholars have observed a process of cultural alienation from the village as a result of the rural economy’s relative stagnation (D. Gupta 2009). Available statistics point to a dramatic disparity in earnings between urban and rural households (Pradhan et al. 2000), showing that urban earnings are on average twice as high as rural earnings. Besides declining incomes from farming, there are stark disparities between rural and urban India in terms of basic public facilities such as drinking water, health care services, and education. Even the land-owning elites of the villages, who are able to protect their vested interests through their political leverage, are turning toward non-farm enterprises and see their futures outside the village, in urban or international spaces (D. Gupta 2009, chap. 7).

Nationwide trends of agricultural decline also occur in central Gujarat, as described from the perspective of Patidars. In the 1950s, the Patidars were an agriculture-oriented community. Land, farming, and agricultural knowledge were important sources of capital, even if some had already migrated to East Africa at that time (Pocock 1972). In the years that followed, when state investment in agriculture and industrialization was still generous, Patidar farmers developed into an entrepreneurial landowning group by diversifying their economic practices: for example, by starting factories and other ventures alongside their agricultural activities (Rutten 1995). By 2013, however, farming was considered an undesirable occupation; Patidar farmers experienced decline and failure as a result of falling profits; the focus had shifted to education, off-farm occupations, and white-collar work (Tilche and Simpson 2017, 700; Tilche and Simpson 2018).

Elsewhere in India, too, the decline of the rural economy is associated with a rural-urban reorientation. Groups of Dalits and Muslims have followed the pathways of urbanization and education as a strategy to escape marginalization in the village and gain respect, even if this does little to change the overall power balance, as powerful landed elites invest in urbanization at the same time to reproduce their privileged status (Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery 2004). Considering these dynamics, we can reconsider the relocation of Muslims to Anand as a process of urbanization, which accelerated dramatically as a result of the 2002 violence.

These urbanization strategies are tied to certain hierarchies, as not everyone has the required economic and social capital to obtain this desired urban footing. As the economists Amitabh Kundu and Lopamudra Ray Saraswati argue, it is as if rural-urban migration in India “has an inbuilt screening system, which is picking up people from relatively higher economic and social strata”—this is because India’s urban centers welcome private capital but have become “less accommodating to the poor, restricting their entry” (2012, 219). Considering the growing rural-urban disparities and the unequal opportunities for mobility in India described by economists, sociologists, and anthropologists, we can start to appreciate the descriptions of Anand by its residents as a lucky place, a place of privilege—an understanding that derives meaning from comparisons with relatives in villages with less “mobility capital” (Alexander, Chatterji, and Jalais 2016, introduction). These are important contexts in which to understand the narratives of rural-urban mobility in Anand.

Reports of the post-violence developments in Gujarat have used the word “displacement” to emphasize the coerced nature of the movements of Muslims. This term is defined in the United Nations category of internally displaced persons as “persons . . . who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence . . .” (United Nations 1998, Principles 3 (25), 2; cited in Lokhande 2015, 15; emphasis mine). With this choice of the word “displacement,” scholars and NGOs contest the claims made by the Government of Gujarat, namely, that the individuals staying in relief colonies after the violence of February 2002 had moved there out of their own volition, and out of personal choice—in other words, that their relocation was just another “migration” (Lokhande 2015, 14–16, 90).29 In these enduring struggles about truth and justice in Gujarat, both the words “displacement” and “migration” have acquired a political meaning.

In Anand, however, the conceptual distinction between forced and voluntary movement is not easy to make. The themes of political marginalization and economic opportunity are both important aspects in the relocation narratives of the residents. Feelings of both being expelled and being privileged surface, sometimes simultaneously. While the existence of the initial refugee camps was directly prompted by the pogroms and can be straightforwardly categorized as displacement, motivations become harder to distinguish in the fifteen years thereafter, when Muslims continued to move to Anand. Concerns over safety and marginalization continue to be discussed throughout these years, but merge with other concerns. These findings provide support for an argument made by Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji, and Annu Jalais that the conceptual distinction between forced and economic migration in the literature is problematic—the first term erases agency, while the second risks erasing the coercive nature of social structures (2016, chap. 1). To recognize the variety of considerations that drove the moves of Muslims to Anand after 2002, the term “relocation” is used in this book—a term that includes but is not limited to displacement.

If the distinction between involuntary and voluntary is hard to make (see also Kirmani 2013, 61–63), the underlying question of what constitutes choice of residence (Jamil 2019, 301) remains when people are confronted with such dramatic residential segregation. The residential patterns in Anand clearly point to a limitation in peoples’ residential choices, and to an imposition of new normative frameworks of what constitutes a “good” and a “bad” place in which to live. These new norms are felt not only by Muslims in Anand but also by Hindus and Christians, and by Muslims who continue to live in Hindu-majority villages.

Urban Segregation

The rural-urban relocation of Muslims to Anand was paired with residential segregation within the town. The perspectives of Christians and Hindus who inhabited the spaces where Muslims settled illuminate how they saw their neighborhood change after 2002. Their narratives highlight considerations of class status and comfort. The issue of safety is not absent from their accounts, but they discuss the problems of residence among Muslims mostly in terms of Muslims’ social unacceptability, and in terms of the residential area’s lack of “development” due to limited access to state services in these parts of the town.

Gamdi was formerly a village and has now become one of the eastern suburbs of Anand. In the late nineteenth century, Gamdi was a hub of missionary activity by Jesuit Catholics and other competing churches, all of which started convents, schools, and housing compounds in and around Gamdi.30 The Christian influence is evident in Gamdi through establishments such as St. Xavier’s High School, Vimal Miriam High School, and the Jesuit-run Anand Press office. Many Christian teachers and clerks work in the schools and offices of Anand and Vidyanagar.31

Mr. Parmar is a teacher, a Catholic, and a long-term resident of Gamdi. His family converted to Christianity from the Hindu community of Vankars, a name that nobody likes to use any more because of its lower-caste status. Vankars, Parmar and others explain, moved from the villages to Anand to escape caste oppression in the villages. The Jesuit church in Gamdi offered Vankars a way out of (caste) oppression via education and urbanization. By moving away from their villages, resettling in housing colonies in Gamdi, and sending their children to Christian schools, many found employment as teachers.

Mr. Parmar traces his roots to the small town of Petlad but grew up in Gamdi. He married and had a daughter. In 2001, when his older brother sold his portion of the family property in Gamdi to him, he decided to improve and expand his house, and air-condition it for his young family, investing an estimated ₹16,00,000 in the property (more than US$34,000).32 Afterward, he saw how the neighborhood changed. Many Christians moved out of Gamdi after 2002. Muslims moved in.

Mr. Parmar shared his views about what happened in 2002: Muslims were forced to move to Anand because “the RSS was slaughtering them in the villages.” He said, “These people [Muslims] . . . I feel for them, they have suffered a lot. I pray for them.” In the rose garden behind the house in Gamdi, in 2011, he and his elderly mother further commented on the arrival of Muslims. They spoke about the “noise pollution” of the new mosques in Gamdi, which called for prayer five times a day. They were surprised by the remarkably large size of some of the new Muslim houses in the vicinity, because they had previously assumed that Muslims were “poor” and “illiterate.” When I asked if they feel safe in Gujarat, considering what happened to the Muslims in 2002, Mr. Parmar said he expected no violence against Christians: “RSS people will kill the Muslims first, and then, Christians will perish by themselves. They hate us equally but we are so small in numbers, they don’t bother about us.”

Rather than the neighbors, however, his primary concern about Gamdi was the way the neighborhood was classified and treated by the municipality—as a minority area. On one of our encounters, in 2011, he took me on his motorbike from Vidyanagar to Gamdi, pointing out the differences in the neighborhoods along the way. “You see,” he shouted when we crossed the overpass and took a sharp turn to enter a small road through Nutan Nagar to Gamdi, “the roads are very bad here. Nobody is maintaining . . . Actually, the municipality should do that. But the municipality is only maintaining the roads in places where Hindus live.”

When a Muslim man came to their house in Gamdi expressing an interest in buying it, Parmar was tempted to sell it. Other Christians in the neighborhood were moving to the new Christian townships that were constructed outside Anand, or moving abroad, and some had managed to sell their houses to Muslims at good prices. But Parmar’s housing society does not allow sales to non-Christians. What he did instead was to arrange a professional caregiver for his elderly mother, who remained in Gamdi, attending to the large house and rose garden, while he, his wife, and daughter moved to a small flat in Vidyanagar, a Hindu-majority locality (where 95 percent of the population was Hindu in 2001, and 96 percent in 2011; see tables A.03 and A.04). This move was fueled by practical reasons: his daughter went to school and his wife worked as a teacher in Vidyanagar, a commute of eight kilometers from Gamdi, while Mr. Parmar’s own job was equidistant from both locations.

After his daughter moved to Ahmedabad for further studies, Mr. Parmar moved back to the big house in Gamdi to reunite with his mother. On the phone in 2021, he commented that many homes in his housing society were now vacant and unlit because many Christian residents had left, some now living abroad. He softened his earlier comments about noise pollution (“noise is everywhere in India, whether you live next to a temple or a mosque”) but reiterated his complaints about infrastructural problems: “In Vidyanagar, town planning is good. But in Gamdi, roads are narrow, garbage is not taken care of properly, electricity can suddenly go away, and if we complain [to the municipality] they don’t listen, or they listen but don’t do anything.” Nevertheless, he was planning to stay in Gamdi at least until his retirement.

Hindus, too, left the area after 2002—some very quickly, some a few years later. Vinod Bhatt,33 who was a boy at the time of the pogroms, was one of the Hindus who lived near the 100 Feet Road in a compound that was a diverse neighborhood at the time. His family lived in the staff quarters of the district’s government hospital along the railway line. During the curfew weeks of 2002, they moved to different houses within Anand. Initially, they remained in their own house; fifteen days later, they moved to a nearby housing society of Hindus from Sindh on the “Hindu” side of the 100 Feet Road; fourteen days later, they moved again, seeking shelter in the house of an uncle on the western outskirts of Anand. When the situation became calm, at the end of March, they returned to their house in the staff quarters.

They had intended to stay there. Vinod regrets eventually moving out, and thinks that his parents did so only because of social pressure from relatives. It was not before 2014 that his family finally decided to give in to this pressure and gave up their house in the hospital staff quarters, where they had lived without costs. They took a substantial loan to build a house near Anand’s Ganesh Chokdi. Drawing a map of the staff quarters while he talked, Vinod reflected on this decision as follows:

There was no discomfort . . . in my family, my nuclear family, we did not have much problem . . . many times in our new home also, I used to miss. . . . Here I had ground. Here I had trees. I was used to seeing the snakes . . . or every time . . . there were huge trees there, mango trees and all. I remember my cousins also used to come there and we used to go out and have mangos from the trees and all. . . . So I used to love staying there. . . . Even my mother liked staying in the quarters. . . . Eight, nine years I had already spent in that area. . . . Before riots we could never think that something like this could have happened.

Vinod never went back to his former neighborhood, not even for a visit. If some Hindus do still live in Muslim-majority areas, he thinks these are less-affluent people, who have no choice:

The Hindus that stay in this community, they are not much affluent, I think. They are doing small things like ironing clothes, selling things, financial constraints are also there. I don’t think any rich Hindu families stay in this area.

Like Mr. Parmar, Vinod also highlighted the lack of development in the parts of the town where Muslims live. Before 2002, Anand’s municipality was dominated by the Congress party; after 2002, the BJP won the municipal elections in the town. The BJP didn’t win in the electoral locations where Muslim live, however, and so their neighborhoods lack powerful representatives and receive little attention from the municipality:

I think the BJP has much to cover. They are not concerned about this Muslim area. They will hardly go and campaign in this area. They focus on the area where they can win. . . . [This is why] . . . if you compare this Muslim area with the other areas of Anand, you will see a drastic difference in development, infrastructure, and everything.

The stories of the Christians and Hindus who lived in the parts of Anand that have now become Muslim-majority neighborhoods illustrate how the post-violence segregation of Anand town constitutes a shared memory for Anand’s residents. Anand has been, and remains, a Hindu-majority town with a sizeable Muslim and Christian population (table A.04). In the neighborhoods into which Muslims moved after 2002, both Hindu and Christian residents moved out. Their moves often entailed traversing only a few kilometers, but expressed a radical transformation of the town’s social geography. Neighborhoods with diverse caste, class, and religious groupings were redefined as either Hindu or Muslim. Christians felt caught in the middle and some sought newer grounds of their own. In 2017, residents pointed out that the 100 Feet Road was no longer the “border,” as it had been in 2002, as Hindus and Jains who lived close to it on the “Hindu” side had started to sell their houses to Muslims.

The Last Muslims in the Village?

In west London, on a quiet morning in March 2015, Salma Vohra beckons me to sit down on the couch with her. She opens a photo album with pictures of a wedding that has recently taken place in Gujarat. As we go through the book, she names all the people in the pictures—photographs taken in the village where she grew up, and which she left after her marriage in the late 1990s, when she moved to London. Suddenly, she starts crying, seeing a picture of her father. He has died recently, and his image has been edited into a photo in the album. Her sadness, however, goes beyond that felt for the death of a parent—something else is going on. Salma is also concerned about the safety of her living relatives. Of the sixty Muslim families in her village, she explains, thirty have moved to Anand. Her own family is among the thirty families who stayed in the village. She exclaims, “They don’t want to move out. We keep telling them to get away, but they won’t. They say they are happy in the village. Many [Muslim] families in the village have already moved to Anand, the rest is planning on moving out too, soon they will be the only ones left!”

Anthropologists hear a lot of stories in the field, but sometimes a story lingers on, repeating itself in the mind. This was one of them. “They are happy in the village,” Salma had said about her relatives. The story seemed to offer a counter-perspective—a Muslim family that stayed put in the village when others had left, even against the advice of relatives in London.

In 2017, while planning a trip to India, I asked Salma if I could visit her family in Gujarat. Our conversations on this question—which occurred over Facebook Messenger and were mediated by her husband, Ibrahim—are themselves revealing of the anxieties involved. I explained that my writing would be anonymous, and that in my book a pseudonym would be used for both the family and the village. Ibrahim replied that “the locals would know exactly who said what given the numbers involved,” but still said, “in any case, let’s see what they say. I will put you in touch . . . if it is likely.” The second time we talked, I was told that the family had agreed. Ibrahim then specified certain conditions for my visit: that it needed to be discreet and “preferably without any involvement of local Patel [Hindu]” families. If their story was to leak to the local Patels, this might negatively affect the family’s position in the village. I agreed not to talk to anyone in the village about the purpose of my visit and not to bring anyone else with me.

Once in India, I made arrangements with Salma’s twenty-two-year-old cousin, Farhan (through WhatsApp), and took a rickshaw from Anand to the village. Farhan was waiting for me on the corner of a small, quiet alley and told the rickshaw driver to stop there, as the alley was accessible only by foot. A man watched us curiously, but we quietly passed by and did not stop to talk to him, as agreed. Farhan led me into an old farmhouse with thick wooden beams. In the cool, quiet interior, his parents and grandmother were waiting for me, along with other relatives.

In London, I was told that the family wanted to stay in the village because “they are happy there.” In the village, I encountered a different story. In fact, soon after we started talking, the family mentioned fear: “Bikh lage che” (“There is fear”), they said. They wanted to sell the house and move to Anand; however, this was not possible because one family member—an elderly uncle who lived upstairs but was not present at the meeting—wanted to stay. While he was alive it would not be possible to sell the house without his permission. So, in polite terms, they were “waiting for the right moment.” Other Muslims in the village were also waiting for the right moment, they said, planning to move to Anand as soon as they could.

The main speaker was Farida. She was the oldest member of the household, Farhan’s grandmother, Salma’s mother. Soon the conversation turned to the pogroms of 2002. At this time, her children and grandchildren had gone to Anand to live in a camp for several weeks, while Farida and her husband, Mohammed, remained in their house in the village:

Our village is good. In our village we have never had any problems. In other villages, there was violence. In the neighboring village there was violence too, but not here. Still, even here, people got scared. During the riots, all Vohras in our village fled their homes and went to Anand. Our family went to Anand, too. Everyone stayed in Anand for two months, except me and my husband. We stayed in our house the entire period. Afterwards, many Muslims left the village. There is fear. They all go. Many people go to that side, to Anand. They are scared.

[I asked Farida if she was scared, too.]

No. We are not scared. We have good relations with our neighbors.

Here the conversation got messy and the message more complex: “Bikh to lage” (“There is fear”), but “Apne bikh na lage” (“We are not scared”). I asked them about the difficulties they confronted. Farhan replied, and spoke about rising tensions in the village. He said that “everyone in the village speaks bad about Muslims,” and that even Muslims in the village join in gossiping about other Muslims. Trust between neighbors had been lost. Some had stopped talking with each other. Furthermore, the recent death of Mohammed, the patriarch of the family, had generated new insecurities. He had been a well-known and widely respected elder of the village. He had maintained friendships as well as financial relations with Hindu families in the village, offering loans and gifts to neighbors in need. With Mohammed gone, what would happen now? Wasn’t it his reputation in the village that had earned the family protection in 2002?

Ibrahim, who was listening in on the conversation by phone from London, offered further explanations from his point of view:

It’s not a specific difficulty that is actually occurring. It’s more a fear of repetition. Knowing what happened in the surrounding villages in 2002, they fear that they will be at risk in the future if it occurs again. The second time there will be no respite.

He continued:

Look at that alley. It’s like Amsterdam, yeah. It’s like one little street leads to another street. And inside this street . . . they are cornered in. If somebody blocks the way . . . you are stuck, you can’t go anywhere.

After adding, “This street is predominantly Hindu, all Hindu,” Ibrahim said that in the past few years, he and his wife have been repeatedly telling their family in the village to “get away, get away, get away.” He also urged me to reinforce this message. “You should maybe reinforce that with them as well, because so far they haven’t listened to us.” At that moment, I turned back to the family to ask what they thought of this advice. Farida smiled and said that she had heard it many times, and not only from her relatives in London. Similar advice had been given by their acquaintances in Anand. “Do you feel social pressure to move?” I asked. “No pressure,” Farhan replied, “only advice.”

“And what do you think, Farhan?” I asked. “Will your future be in the city? Or will you also still be in the village?” After all, I thought, this family has land and properties here that might be worth holding onto. Farhan, a student of engineering, replied decidedly, “I want to be in the town. . . . People are a problem, and no facilities available. No facilities. Like, if you want to move anywhere, in Anand, you can go easily. Here, it is a problem.”

What I learned that day in 2017 is that, even fifteen years after the violence, the threat of recurrence continued to prompt relocation. Gujarati Muslim families such as Salma’s continue to move from their villages to Anand to this day, or aspire to do so, despite continuously rising housing prices in Anand that make the move difficult and, for many, even unaffordable. These reorientations toward Anand, moreover, do not occur only in villages that were directly affected by the violence, but also in those that remained relatively safe. The fact that there has not been any large-scale violence in Gujarat since 2002 is not considered an indication that peace has been restored and the violence is over. At present, anti-Muslim violence seems to be concentrated in other parts of India, but it might return to Gujarat. Those who were waiting for the mobs in 2002 are, in that sense, still waiting.

Conclusion

If communal violence is a strategy to reshape space (Deshpande 1998), then the violence of 2002 has been highly successful in achieving this aim. After 2002, novel understandings of space as either Hindu, Muslim, or Christian prompted many people to change localities. In the years thereafter, the divisions consolidated, and Muslims kept moving into Anand’s Muslim area.

Existing research in Gujarat has shown that considerable residential segregation along religious lines has taken place in response to communal violence, even if some of the smaller towns in central Gujarat seem to have escaped such developments. In the city of Ahmedabad, where violent episodes had been occurring since 1985, before culminating in the 2002 pogroms, studies point to the demarcation of Hindu and Muslim spaces—physical landmarks that differentiate these spaces from one another—and to Muslims seeking residence among people of their own religious community in search of safety.34 The case of Anand shows that such residential segregation occurs not only within the spaces of the city, but also at the regional scale. It points toward a shift in how rural-urban spatiality is perceived, in terms of a Hindu-Muslim division. The interviews, observations, and household surveys presented here, substantiated with census data, all confirm this.

The violence influenced the broad and long-term process of urbanization in the region. Beyond the moment of the flight and the political controversies that surround it, this chapter has discussed the slow, cautious, and thoughtful ways in which people relocate, consider relocating, advise others to relocate, or stay put while looking ahead toward new places. These considerations involve issues of violence and safety (as outlined by other scholars), but also desires to move out of the village and up the social ladder. On one hand, Muslims in the village look toward Anand in hopes of a better future for themselves and their children. On the other hand, non-Muslims who had resided in the urban Muslim area express their concerns over development, access to services, and social status as their reasons for moving out. Rural-urban migrants who have assets in the village may hold onto them while they carve out a new position in the town.

The urban experience of life in a segregated Muslim area is also one of sustaining and forging connections with the realms beyond it. A hint about the importance of mobility is revealed in the chance remark by Farhan, the engineering student, that “if you want to move anywhere, in Anand, you can go easily.”