Where Memory Refuses to Die: Language, Denial, and the Ghosts of Gujarat

Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence and Explicit Language

Illustration by Vasundhara Srinivas

What does it mean to move on from violence when memory itself is a site of conflict? In Gujarat, the legacy of the 2002 pogrom has been carefully, even violently, curated into the official memory of the state, one that erases as much as it remembers. What remains is not reconciliation, but a selective memorisation that excludes the lived trauma of the Muslim community.

Memory, as David Mwambari explains, operates through two competing but intertwined forces: hegemonic memory and vernacular memory. Hegemonic memory refers to the dominant, state-backed narrative that claims authority over how the past is remembered. It often draws from globally recognisable frameworks such as Holocaust memorialisation to lend itself legitimacy, while marginalising alternative accounts. In contrast, vernacular memory emerges from the grassroots. It is personal, communal, oral, and often hidden from public view. It is the memory of those who are not commemorated in textbooks or official memorials but remembered nonetheless through poetry, prayer, and place (Mwambari 2021).

This column takes Gujarat’s post-violence landscape as its analytical frame, questioning how memory is mobilised to craft narratives of normalcy, development, and peace while simultaneously silencing vernacular forms of remembering. Drawing on the idea of hegemonic versus vernacular memory, it interrogates how the post-2002 Gujarat state and its apparatuses have shaped the dominant narrative around the pogrom, rendering victims not only displaced in space but also erased in history.

Who gets to be remembered, and on whose terms? What happens when the only markers of a community’s suffering are ghettoised relief colonies and oral testimonies shared in hushed voices? And what kind of nation emerges when its memory is scaffolded by denial?

From the language of "riots" to the slow institutional erasure of Urdu, Gujarat has become not just a case of communal violence but of calculated forgetting. Since the architecture of state apathy has transformed memory into both a battleground and a lifeline, reclaiming vernacular memory remains one of the most radical acts of resistance today.

Post-Genocide Rwanda and the Politics of Memory 

In his study of post-genocide Rwanda, David Mwambari (2021) argues that memory is never neutral. It is constructed, curated, and often weaponised by those in power. He introduces the idea of hegemonic memory: state-endorsed narratives that become the dominant way a society is told to remember. These narratives are usually shaped by political agendas, global legitimacy, and selective moral framing. Running alongside hegemonic memory, and often in tension with it, is vernacular memory: local, community-based, and emotionally grounded forms of remembrance that do not rely on institutional backing. These grassroots memories, through oral testimonies, poetry, prayers, and commemorative rituals, keep alive the dignity and grief of those whose stories are not recognised by the state.

In Gujarat, post-2002, the selective erasure of Muslim suffering reflects this split. What is remembered publicly is controlled, sanitised, and couched in language like “riot”, a term that dilutes the targeted nature of the violence. What is left out is the lived reality of those relegated to relief colonies, pushed to the geographic and political margins of cities like Ahmedabad. These physical spaces, in their neglect and isolation, have become unintentional monuments of the state’s refusal to acknowledge the trauma they hold.

To understand how this official memory has been built and normalised, I turn to the work of civil rights activists like Teesta Setalvad and Harsh Mander, as well as court-ordered Special Investigation Team (SIT) reports and extensive media documentation. Their work not only archives the violence but also challenges the state-sponsored forgetting that defines Gujarat’s post-pogrom landscape.

Gujarat Pogrom: A Historical Background

On 27th February 2002, the Sabarmati Express train carrying Hindu Karsevaks (Hindu Activists) returning from Ayodhya caught fire near Godhra, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat. Around 59 Karsevaks were killed in the fire. What followed after this was three days of widespread communal violence targeted chiefly at the Muslim community in the state. A report published by Human Rights Watch, We Have No Orders to Save You, states that groups of militant Hindus, with active support from Hindu right-wing political factions like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the Bajrang Dal singularly targeted Muslims across Gujarat: killing close to 2,000 people (which included some Hindu, Christian, and Parsi fatalities as well), ‘disappearing’ an estimated 2,500 people, and driving tens of thousands from their homes (Bal, 2022).

The then-Chief Minister of the state, Mr Narendra Modi, attracted a lot of national and international criticism for his government’s inability to control the violence along with various allegations of complicity in the massacre of the Muslim populace at the hands of Hindu mobs mobilised by neo-fascist Hindu militant groups. The pogrom of 2002 is considered a significant blot on the political career of Mr Modi. It has continued to dictate the political discourse around his rapid rise to Prime Ministership in the country. 

The Language of Denial 

The Godhra Train Burning incident has been memorised in the popular imagination as a watershed moment, a sort of "precipitating event" (Nussbaum, 2007) that marked the making of the Gujarat pogrom. The Gujarat pogrom was the first act of mass violence that was live-streamed and broadcasted 24/7 on news channels across the country (the privatisation of news channels provided them with the freedom to broadcast violence without any state-controlled rules and regulations). A cause-and-effect terminology was and still is employed by the state media to memorise the mass violence and persecution faced by the Muslim community in the state. This narrative has become part of the common parlance of the masses and has solidified as the official narrative around the pogrom. What is interesting is the pervasive use of the word 'riot' to describe the violence that was essentially targeted at one community while being sustained and supported by the state machinery.

Howard Spodek called Gujarat the 'Hindutva Laboratory' which used the pogrom against the Muslims to teach them a lesson and remind them of their place in the larger Hindutva order (Spodek, 2010). Propaganda material in the form of flyers, leaflets and pamphlets was distributed across the state by militant mobs while the massacre continued across Ahmedabad. One such flyer signed by the leader of Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) called mobs to deliver "vengence" unto the "miyas" and "bibis". 

The volcano which was inactive has erupted

It has burnt the arse of miyas [Muslim men] and made them dance nude

We have untied the penises that were tied till now

We have widened the tight vaginas of the bibis [Muslim women] (Sarkar, 2002) 

Categorising systematic violence and persecution of a community as a 'riot' and reducing the event's causality to just a cause-and-effect explanation essentially blinds us to the historical narrative and propaganda against the Muslim minority in the country. To look at the Godhra train burning as the starting point of the pogrom is to employ the age-old communal logic of the 'who cast the first stone thesis', articulated aptly by Teesta Setalvad, "where every act of violence of the majority Hindu is an act of retaliation of the perennially and permanently barbaric Mussalmaan." (Setalvad, 2017). 

This raises urgent questions about how the memory of the 2002 violence has been shaped in the national consciousness. Who has been excluded by framing the pogrom as a riot? Whose political and ideological interests are served by this terminology? And, most importantly, what must the marginalised do to reclaim their narrative?

To explore these questions, it is essential to examine the politics of memory operating in Gujarat. Unlike post-genocide Rwanda, where hegemonic and vernacular memories coexist in tension and occasionally intersect through what Mwambari (2021) calls "knots of memory" moments where official and grassroots narratives briefly entangle, overlap, or inform one another, the situation in Gujarat presents a stark contrast. Here, hegemonic memory does not merely overshadow vernacular memory but actively seeks to erase it. It invalidates the lived experiences and grief of Muslim communities whose stories lie outside the officially sanctioned narrative.

Here, hegemonic memory is violently and actively invisibilising and invalidating vernacular memory, which represents the experiences of the Muslim minorities. One of the most visible forms of this suppression is the systematic erasure of Urdu as a language in Gujarat by the BJP-led government, as pointed out by the vernacular narratives of local Muslim poets and artists. While Gujarati is spoken by 90.41 percent of the state’s population, Urdu is spoken by just 1.89 percent, making it the language of a clear minority. This linguistic marginalisation has relegated Urdu to the bottom of the language hierarchy, with Gujarati and Hindi occupying dominant positions. As a result, the erasure of Urdu is not only a cultural loss but a strategic silencing of a community’s memory and voice.

The following are lines penned by poet Raunaq Afroz commenting on the state persecution of the Urdu language and its speakers: 

"May good come the way of Narendra Modi who, as soon as he came to power, killed Urdu in Gujarat. Not only did Modi do that, but in 2002, under a well-thought-out plan for the whole of Gujarat, he played so nakedly with violence and barbaric riots that he shamed the whole of humanity. Everywhere, with loot and killings, murder and mayhem, rape, burning and genocide of the minority community, he created a climate of terror in the land." 

In the case of the Gujarat pogrom, the state has not only categorised a targeted campaign of violence as a routine instance of Hindu-Muslim communal conflict—it has also launched a multi-pronged attack on all forms of vernacular memory. Through legal mechanisms, cultural marginalisation, and administrative neglect, it has worked to erase the voices and histories that challenge its dominant script.

Smoke and Mirrors: The Conflictual Past and The State

“Khel-kood toh sab khatam hi ho gaya hamara

Bhag-daud mein lag gaye, ki hum gujaara kaise kare”

"All the playing around disappeared,

We became caught in figuring out how to get by."

These are the words of Malik, a pogrom survivor. He was barely 17 when a mob attacked his predominantly Muslim locality of Naroda Padiya in Ahmedabad and left 90 Muslims dead. "Aagey aagey police chalti thii, picche picche tola"—the police walked in front, and the mob followed them, Malik recounted. "Police walein khud bolte the, 'Bhonsdi ke, dartey kyun ho? Maro na goli.’" The police officials said, "Bastards, what are you scared of? Shoot them" (SAGAR, 2017).

The violence in Gujarat left thousands displaced and homeless. According to a survey conducted in 2012 by Janvikas, a non-governmental organisation established in 1987, Islamic charitable organisations and NGOs set up all the relief colonies in Gujarat, 81 in total, to house internally displaced persons or IDPs. The relief colonies accommodate approximately 50,000 victims.

However, the figure included only those who could obtain ration cards; the number of displaced people could be up to 200,000 (Mander, 2006). It is crucial to note here that all the relief colonies that sprung up in Gujarat were set up exclusively by members of civil society, especially organisations affiliated with the religion of the affected group. The inability of the BJP government to provide necessary support and rehabilitation to the victims of the pogrom is not a lapse of the government on an administrative front but rather a case of blatant negligence and apathy directed towards victims of targeted communal violence.

To sum up the Modi government’s attitude towards setting up relief colonies, one can simply look at a statement made by him when he was asked about his government’s failure to establish relief camps. He is reported to have replied, “Why should I? I do not want to set up baby-producing factories.” Furthermore, his government did not even provide land for setting up the colonies (Times of India, 2002).

The state repeatedly refused to acknowledge the existence of these relief colonies, which can only be described as localities on the margins of the city where necessities like water and sanitation are scantily available. Most of these slums and colonies have no schools, and many children dropped out of school after the pogrom and never returned (Mander, 2006). The denial of all support from the state has led to the dangerous ghettoisation of these communities. These spaces, neglected and invisibilised, have become physical monuments of the absence of state responsibility and the memory of targeted violence.

Drawing from David Mwambari’s work on post-genocide Rwanda, these colonies may also be understood as sites of vernacular memory. While the state constructs a hegemonic memory that denies the violence or recasts it in neutral terms, these marginal spaces and their inhabitants continue to preserve and transmit the memory of the pogrom through oral histories, everyday rituals, and the very architecture of their displacement. In this context, the relief colonies are not just spaces of abandonment but also quiet sites of resistance, where the act of remembering itself becomes a form of survival (Mwambari, 2021).

Vernacular Memory and its afterlife in Gujarat

The language of denial, coupled with the apathy of the state and the subsequent ghettoisation of the Muslim community in Gujarat, has made the physical sites of these relief colonies both literal and metaphorical relics/monuments of the violent history of suppression faced by the Muslim community in the 2002 pogrom. The ghettos of Ahmedabad carry stories of both oppression and survival in them, as the inhabitants of these colonies are living archives of their unacknowledged conflictual past that seeped way deep into their present. 

To expand the scope of the final question proposed in the article, if these colonies are sites of both oppression and survival, then how do the disfranchised navigate this space of contradictions and claim back their narrative? The answer lies, as always, in the dissenting power of vernacular memory (Mwambari 2021). This type of memory, rooted in oral traditions and grassroots practices, holds the potential to speak truth to power. 

In the Rwandan context, David Mwambari speaks of Agaciro, a concept from Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda, which embodies dignity, self-respect, and self-worth. It is not a static status but something to be fought for, particularly by those who have been silenced or marginalised by official history. Through the quiet act of remembering, the marginalised assert their Agaciro and their right to exist, to mourn, and to be seen.

—

What this piece ultimately hopes to show is that even within spaces marked by abandonment and neglect, there remains a persistent will to resist through remembrance. In Gujarat, the relief colonies and the segregated geographies of Ahmedabad have become more than just sites of survival. They have transformed into living archives, quiet monuments of a violent past that continues to be denied or diluted by the state’s hegemonic memory. These spaces carry contradictions. They are both sites of erasure and of resistance, where the act of remembering becomes a form of reclaiming personhood. The refusal to forget is, in itself, a political act.

The following rubaai (quatrain) written by Urdu poet and pogrom survivor Aqeel Shatir are enough to contextualise this argument in the Gujarat case (Kumar, 2010). In these spaces of deprivation and denial, memory endures as both resistance and survival, keeping alive what the state wishes forgotten. 

“Abhi zindaa hoon main, dekho meri pehchaan baaqi hai

Badan zakhmi hai lekin abhi mujh mein jaan baaqi hai 

Tum apni hasraton ko zaalimon marne nahin dena 

Shahadat ka mere dil mein abhi armaan baaqi hai” 

“I am still alive, the person I was is left in me 

This body is wounded, but there is still life left in me 

You, my killers, don't let your ambitions die 

The desire for martyrdom is still left in me."

Vaishnavi Manju Pal (she/they) holds a Distinction in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London, where their research focused on 'Dalit Masculinities and Alternate Politics of Radical Dalit Assertion.' They are a lecturer and module leader in Social Sciences, based in London.

A columnist at Political Pandora, they write 'Frames of Reference,' a column that examines socio-political realities through multiple theoretical lenses, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent. Their work engages with the lived experiences of its diverse populations, aiming to bridge the gap between academia and public discourse through accessible yet critically rigorous cultural and political analysis.

A firm believer in the power of marginalized voices, Vaishnavi has served as President of the SOAS Ambedkar Society. They are committed to contributing to radical discourse—one class, one student, one paper, and one revolution at a time.

---

Disclaimer

Any facts, views or opinions are not intended to malign, criticise and/or disrespect any religion, group, club, organisation, company, or individual.

This article published on this website is solely representative of the author. Neither the editorial staff nor the organisation (Political Pandora) are responsible for the content.

All illustrations in this piece are original works created exclusively by the Design Department of Political Pandora.

These illustrations are protected and are not available for replication, reproduction, or redistribution in any form without explicit written consent from Political Pandora. Unauthorized use, including but not limited to copying, modifying, or redistributing, is strictly prohibited.

Photographs in this particular article are taken from external sources and are not a property of Political Pandora. The use of these images are not meant for commercial purposes.

While we strive to present only reliable and accurate information, should you believe that any information present is incorrect or needs to be edited, please feel free to contact us.

---

References:

• Bal, Hartosh Singh. “How the SIT Report Gave the Modi Government a Free Pass on the 2002 Gujarat Violence.” The Caravan, 31 Aug. 2022, www.caravanmagazine.in/law/sit-free-pass-modi.

• Jaffrelot, C. (2015). What ‘Gujarat model’?—Growth without development—And with socio-political polarisation. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38(4), 820-838.

• Kumar, Amitava. “I Am Still Alive: In Gujarat, a Poet and His Uneasy Relationship with Power.” The Indian Express, 31 Dec. 2010, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/i-am-still-alive/.

• Mander, H. (2006). Inside Gujarat's Relief Colonies: Surviving State Hostility and Denial. Economic and Political Weekly, 5235-5239.

• Mwambari, D. (2021). Agaciro, vernacular memory, and the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda. African Affairs, 120(481), 611-628.

• Nussbaum, M. (2009). The clash within: Democracy, religious violence, and India's future. Harvard University Press.

• Sagar. (2017, February 27). Fifteen years on, the first-generation survivors of the 2002 riots await rehabilitation, jobs and education. The Caravan. https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/gujarat-riots-first-generation-survivors

• Sarkar, S. (1993). The fascism of the Sangh Parivar. Economic and Political Weekly, 163-167.

• Sarkar, T. (2002). Semiotics of terror: Muslim children and women in Hindu Rashtra. Economic and political weekly, 2872-2876.

• Setalvad, T. (2017). Foot Soldier of the Constitution: A Memoir. Leftword.

• Sircar, O. (2019). Gujarat 2002: Refracted memories, inadequate images. In Human Rights in India (pp. 125-151). Routledge.

• Spodek, H. (2010). In the Hindutva laboratory: Pogroms and politics in Gujarat, 2002. Modern Asian Studies, 44(2), 349-399.

• Times of India. (2002, September 9). No relief camps for producing kids, remarks Modi. Times of India. Retrieved June 15, 2025, from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/no-relief-camps-for-producing-kids-remarks-modi/articleshow/21695855.cms

Keywords: Gujarat Pogrom, 2002 Gujarat Violence, Communal Violence Gujarat, Hegemonic Memory, Vernacular Memory, Muslim Community Gujarat, State-Sponsored Violence, Memory Politics India, Narendra Modi Gujarat, Relief Colonies Gujarat, Ghettoisation Ahmedabad, Urdu Language Erasure, Hindutva Laboratory, Survivors Testimonies Gujarat