Sabarmati

Gangster-Politician Atiq Ahmed Gets Life Sentence in Umesh Pal Abduction Case

While two others were also found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, seven of the accused were acquitted. Umesh Pal, who was the primary witness in a murder case in which Atiq Ahmed was allegedly involved, was himself killed in February this year.

New Delhi: A day after the former MP and MLA Atiq Ahmed was brought from Sabarmati Jail to Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj amidst dramatic media coverage, he was sentenced to rigorous life imprisonment by an MP-MLA court in an abduction case on Tuesday. The court also ordered the same punishment for Dinesh Pasi and Khan Saulat Hanif and imposed a Rs 5,000 fine on all three. All the other seven accused, including Ahmed’s brother Ashraf, were acquitted.

The abduction case goes back to July 2007, when Ahmed and his aides were accused of kidnapping and torturing Umesh Pal, who was the primary witness in a murder case in which Ahmed was allegedly involved. Umesh Pal and two of his bodyguards were murdered in broad daylight in Allahabad in February this year, leading to a huge uproar in the UP assembly. Ahmed is also the main accused in the murder of Umesh Pal.

Umesh Pal was the primary witness in the 2005 murder case of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA Raju Pal, who had defeated Ahmed in the assembly elections. Umesh Pal had accused Raju Pal’s political rival Ahmed of the murder. Since then Umesh Pal was allegedly under threat.

Umesh Pal had alleged that Ahmed had kidnapped him from his vehicle in 2005 after he testified against him in the Raju Pal murder case. He also accused him of electrocuting him to force him to withdraw his statement. Following the alleged episode, Umesh had given a written statement in 2006 that Ahmed was not present at the scene of Raju Pal’s murder and that he didn’t want to testify.

However, in 2007, after the Mayawati-led BSP government came to power in the state, Umesh Pal registered the abduction case against Ahmed. The trial began in 2009 after the police framed charges against Ahmed. The news agency ANI reported that in 2016, “an attempt was made to throw Umesh Pal from the fourth floor of the court premises to make him withdraw the case”, an FIR for which was registered at a Prayagraj police station.

Umesh Pal had appealed to the court for a fast hearing following the episode. But the Allahabad high court ordered the MP-MLA court to finish the hearing of the abduction case by March 16, 2023. Umesh Pal, however, isn’t alive anymore. He was murdered on February 24, when he was returning from a hearing of his abduction case.

His wife and mother expressed their satisfaction with the judgment but appealed for the death sentence to be imposed on Ahmed in the Umesh Pal murder case, reported ANI.

Ahmed was a former gangster who became a politician. He served as both an MP and an MLA and is said to have close links with many political parties in UP, including the BJP and SP. He has more than 100 cases registered against him. It has been alleged that Ahmed, who was lodged in the Deoria prison, planned Umesh Pal’s murder remotely in February. He was transferred to Sabarmati jail in Gujarat for security reasons after Umesh Pal’s murder.

Godhra, Where the Fall of India’s Democracy Began

The burning train on February 27, 2002 – and the lies and false narratives built around it – kept Narendra Modi in power in Gujarat, and started him on the road to becoming the prime minister of India.

This week is the 20th anniversary of the single most fateful event in the history of Independent India. Had carriage S-6 of the Sabarmati Express not burnt down outside Godhra station in the early morning of February 27, 2002, killing 59 persons, the Gujarat riots would not have occurred, and Narendra Modi would not have been the prime minister of India today.

Had that tragic event not taken place, the Bharatiya Janata Party could easily have lost the assembly election that was originally scheduled for April 2003 but brought ahead to December 2002 at Modi’s urging to capitalise on the religious polarisation the violence had caused. The BJP had lost the gram panchayat elections in 2001 and three assembly by-elections the same year, and was badly rattled. This was what had led to the replacement of chief minister Keshubhai Patel, whose health had allegedly begun to fail, with Modi in October 2001. Modi faced the daunting task of shoring up the BJP’s support base in Gujarat. Politically, the fire on the Sabarmati Express came as an answer to the party’s prayers.

The train was carrying a large number of kar sevaks who had forcibly boarded the train at Ayodhya. When it arrived at Godhra, therefore, it was carrying 2,000 or more passengers against a capacity of 1,100. When coach S-6 caught fire, it was jam packed with some of these kar sevaks.

The presence of the kar sevaks, the fact that some of these had misbehaved with Muslim vendors on the platform at Godhra both while on their way to Ayodhya and on their way back, and that an ugly spat had broken out on the platform minutes before the train left Godhra on that fateful morning, made just about everyone in Gujarat jump to the conclusion that angry Muslims had chased the train and set fire to the carriage, as an act of revenge.

By the afternoon of February 27, local Gujarati newspapers had universally ascribed the act to Ghanchi Muslims of a nearby shanty colony, who had been waiting with stones and rags dipped in kerosene to seek revenge. According to those news reports, no sooner did the train stop did they smash the windows and throw flaming kerosene-soaked rags into the bogey and set them on fire.

These reports formed the basis of the first police chargesheet in the case, with manufactured eyewitnesses, all from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who presented identical statements about kerosene being thrown into the coach from outside.

The pogrom that followed is now history. But, in another of history’s fateful ironies, this initial claim by the police about the train fire was completely unfounded and had to eventually be abandoned in favour of a supposedly more plausible but equally unbelievable theory. Having declared from day one that the fire had been a deeply planned (Muslim) conspiracy, all the facts had to be tailor made to sustain this claim.

Also read: The Soul-Wounds of Massacre, or Why We Should Not Forget the 2002 Gujarat Pogrom

The lengths to which the Modi-led state government went to reinforce and sustain a falsehood in the face of the anomalies that it could not explain, was not accidental. On the contrary, it was sanctioned and sustained by Modi himself, with the express purpose of creating a wave of Islamophobia that would sweep the BJP back to power in Gujarat.

In 2005, the railway minister in the then UPA government, Lalu Prasad Yadav, appointed a retired Calcutta high court judge, U.C. Banerjee, to head an inquiry into its cause. The Bannerjee commission appointed a five-man team of experts to re-examine the evidence. After a three-year lapse, the expert committee was left with only one way to do this: look at other carriages that had caught fire and compare the burn and smoke patterns in them to the one in S-6.

There were five burnt carriages preserved in the railway yards after earlier forensic examinations. In one of these, the burn and smoke pattern was almost identical to that found in S-6. The cause of that fire was known and not in doubt: it had begun in the centre of the carriage, possibly when someone knocked over a lighted cooking stove on which food was being warmed or tea made.

The flames had remained restricted to that area but the smoke the fire created had spread to the rest of the carriage, through the gaps between the upper and lower berths, and along the underside of the ceiling. As in S-6, the majority of deaths had resulted from asphyxiation. This explanation gained credibility because the railways were not using flame-retardant materials in second-class compartments then. So even a lighted match could start a fire and create large volumes of toxic smoke. What is more, cooking or warming one’s own food on long train journeys was, and may still be, a common practice among orthodox Hindus.

The BJP vociferously rejected the Banerjee commission’s report. The party’s then spokesman, Arun Jaitley, raised procedural objections, saying that the railway ministry, even while belonging to the Union government, had no right to conduct such an inquiry. “If it was an accident, what prevented passengers from jumping out?” he asked, rhetorically.

Following a strategy with which we have now become familiar, the state government got one of the Hindus who had been injured in the fracas on the Godhra platform in 2002 to challenge Justice Banerjee’s report in the Gujarat high court. The presiding judge then declared the formation of the Banerjee Committee “unconstitutional, illegal and null and void”, and called it a “colourable exercise of power with mala fide intentions”. He went on to berate the railway ministry for daring to set up the committee when the state government had already appointed the Shah commission, later joined by retired Supreme Court justice G.T. Nanavati, on March 8, immediately after the riots. He also dismissed the right of the railways to set up a high-level committee to ascertain how a fire had started on its own property, in order to make sure that it did not happen again.

This judgment was extraordinary, to say the least, but one does not have to rely on the Banerjee commission’s report alone to question the official account of how the fire started.

The report prepared by teams of experts from the Gujarat government’s own Forensic Science Laboratory in Ahmedabad after a site visit on May 3, 2002, formally debunked the police’s earlier explanation and concluded that the fire was consistent with what might happened if “60 litres of flammable liquid had been poured using an unusually wide-mouthed container like a bucket” on to the floor of the coach and set alight.

Why did the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) so comprehensively debunk the claims made in the police’s chargesheet? The answer could be that Modi had learned through the intelligence department that the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal (CCT), headed by former Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, was planning to visit Godhra in the beginning of May. The Ghanchi Muslim revenge plot explanation was therefore about to come apart.

This is what the CCT concluded after its own visit:

“On 7-5-2002, we inspected the coach and the site where it was burnt. The site where the train stopped is an elevated bund. From the ground level, the height of the bund could be about 12-15 feet and it is a slope. At the top, there is hardly enough space for 2,000 persons to assemble on either side of the track. Assuming that so many had gathered at that spot, the crowd would be spread over a much larger area than the stretch of coach S-6. This is only to indicate that if the government version is true, the other coaches would have been as easy a target as Coach S-6.

Again, if one takes into account the height of the bund and the height of the train, and if fire-balls were to be thrown at the train, the outside of the coach should have shown signs of being charred. But we found that there were no such marks below the windows; the charred marks were to be seen only around the windows and above that height. This is a clear indication that the fire started inside the coach and the flames leaping out of the windows singed the outside of the compartment, above window level (emphasis added). Therefore, even to the naked eye, it was clear that the fire was from within and not from outside.”

But if the fire started within, who could have possibly lit it? The Gujarat government needed an answer that would justify the collective punishment that the Hindu community had inflicted upon the Muslims in the days that followed. Building on the FSL’s ‘scientific’ analysis, the police came up with a new explanation. Investigating officers claimed that some Muslims had boarded the train when it stopped opposite Signal Falia, cut the vestibule connecting S-6 and S-7, forcibly entered S-6 and poured 60 litres of petrol down the corridor and set a match to it.

Also read: 1984, 1989, 2002: Three Narratives of Injustice, and the Lessons for Democracy

The absurdities in this theory have been pointed out many times in the last two decades. First, since buckets would have had to be carried by hand, and very few buckets have a capacity of more than 20 litres, a minimum of three buckets would have had to be carried on to the train. Would a train jam-packed with hyped-up kar sewaks spoiling for a fight have allowed three persons carrying buckets of a fluid whose smell is easily recognisable to board the train at a place where a large crowd of hostile Muslims had already collected? Clearly not, which is why the police could not find a single passenger to corroborate this absurd claim.

Curiously, the FSL’s ‘experts’ based their 60 litres calculation upon how far the liquid would travel in an empty carriage, not one that was jampacked with people whose shoes, and luggage, would have come in the way. For, as the tally of the dead and injured showed, there were at least 108 persons in the carriage when the fire broke out, not counting those who escaped before the rush of panic-stricken passengers to the doorways began. It is inconceivable that forensic experts could have made such an elementary mistake. So the only explanation is that they were commanded to find another explanation that would continue to point the finger of blame at the Muslim community. And they obliged.

In Ahmedabad, on February 27, 2002, VHP cadres roamed the streets announcing that a large number of kar sevaks returning from their holy mission in Ayodhya had been burnt alive by Muslims in Godhra. On February 28, they took processions through the city, holding the charred (and unrecognisable) corpses high to build up the mountainous wave of hate that broke upon the city the next morning. However reprehensible their actions were considered, no one doubted them, and almost no one doubts even today that these were indeed the corpses of kar sevaks. But a close analysis of the identities of the passengers in the ill-fated S-6 carriage shows that most of those who died were ordinary passengers who had boarded the train at Lucknow and intermediate stops, before it was swamped by kar sewaks in Ayodhya.

The railway booking chart for the carriage at Lucknow shows that 43 of the 72 berths in carriage S-6 had confirmed bookings. Of these 19 were for adult males, 19 were for adult females and five were for minors. More than half of the booked passengers were families travelling together. Another 23 passengers had boarded the train at intermediate stations. Since they all had berths, few if any would have been near the vestibules at the two ends of the carriage, and therefore in a position to escape when the fire started.

The first to die would have been the weakest among them, the women and the children. The forensic examination of the dead, carried out three days later, confirmed this for it showed that whereas 20 of the dead were men, 26 were women, and 12 were children. In all, 38 of the 58 dead were of the wrong sex and age to have been kar sevaks. Even among the male casualties, a large number, probably the majority, would have died because they stayed with their families, trying to get out till the smoke overwhelmed them.

The number of kar sevaks killed may have been even smaller for, as the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer pointed out, all but a fraction of these were physically fit young men who, having muscled their way on to the train, were more likely to be at the ends of the carriage than the middle, and would have been able to muscle their way out of the burning carriage with relative ease. That many did indeed do so is suggested by the fact that of the 43 persons who are known to have managed to escape from the carriage, only five needed to be hospitalised. Taking all this into account, it is unlikely that even a dozen of those killed were kar sevaks.

Looking back at the events of February 27, 2002, it is difficult not to conclude that it was the day when India’s voyage to modern nationhood began to fail. For Godhra brought Narendra Modi to power in Gujarat, and started him on the road to becoming the prime minister of India. Modi consolidated his party’s power in Gujarat by sowing fear and suspicion between communities. He is now doing the same in India. And there is no one to stop him.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and former editor. He is the author of Dawn of the Solar Age: an End to Global Warming and Fear (Sage 2017) and is currently a visiting fellow at the Centre for Environment Studies, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

What Is Gandhian Architecture and How Must It Be Preserved?

While there is much talk of a “world-class makeover” of the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad, Gandhian building philosophy however, points in a wholly different direction.

There is much talk of a “world-class makeover” of the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad these days. Gandhian building philosophy however, points in a wholly different direction. Interestingly, there is relatively little in the Gandhian archive to vouch for an authentic Gandhian architecture. If we read the household space of Bapu Kuti, the hut in Wardha that Gandhi moved into in 1937 while engaging in village-improvement work, some clues unravel. That structure was designed by his disciple Madeleine Slade (Mirabehn) in keeping with medical advice about Gandhi’s continuing poor health and his need for a “quieter place.” While Slade drew on Gandhi’s need for privacy to imagine an adequate interior world for him, she was not thinking in terms of the continuity of Bapu Kuti’s existence over a period of time. After all, the hut was made out of mud and wattle. From the moment of its inception, Bapu Kuti was to remain exposed to the depredations of time and disrepair.

A house is a kind of guarantee against instability. It is a space where the processes of caring for oneself, or the processes of making and remaking oneself to stay alive can transpire without interruptions. The house is a reassured space for the social reproduction of labour. With its impermanent mud and wattle walls, Bapu Kuti was certainly no such reassured place to tide over discontinuity and impermanence. What exactly was Bapu Kuti then, if not a house in the conventional sense?

Bapu Kuti interior. Photo: Venugopal Maddipati

Consider Gandhi’s observations related to village-improvement work in the mid 1930s, closer to the time he took up residence in Segaon. In 1935, he recommended a grass hut as a house for a village improvement worker in Gujarat. The hut was to be built within the perimeter of the village, and not at a distance from it since it was important for improvement workers to live in the midst of working villagers continuously. In his “letter to a village worker” Gandhi wrote, “A villager absorbed in his [sic] work has no time to go on friendly visits. We must try to emulate him [sic]. You must therefore make it a rule not to move out beyond a radius of ten miles… It is impossible to get under the skin of the villagers until one lives in their midst all the twenty-four hours for an unbroken period.”

Gandhi’s prose is revealing. The improvement worker’s task of emulating “the villager” implied that no less than the entirety of his day, even the time spent in the household for self-care and self-preservation, was to be devoted to the productive labour of village improvement work. Far from a reassured space for the social reproduction of labour, the improvement worker’s house was itself a place of toil. Moreover, not only was the time of the reproduction of labour power, or more specifically, the time spent in the house recovering and resting from work to be placed under the strain, the house itself, on account of its very fragile material constitution, was to remain a cause of physical strain.

To understand this, one may draw attention to Gandhi’s continuing ennoblement of suffering and strain in a religious sense, through his pursuit of varnashramadharma. As is only well known, in Gandhi’s imagination it was often the arms bearing warrior or Kshatriya who willingly suffered through acts of self-sacrificing self-limitation. To commit oneself to staying within the place of fragility and transience, or more specifically, to commit oneself to staying within the space of strain and discontinuity was to be a Kshatriya. The house, in this view, was not so much the space of self-care as it was the space of self-sacrifice. In fact, the fragile material constitution of the house, if not the unremitting nature of the labour of inhabiting it, was but a mere outer manifestation of its occupant’s inward penchant for self-manifesting as a Kshatriya.

There is, however, a paradox in this reading. No sooner do we begin to tether the improvement worker’s house to the fortunes of the self, Gandhi begins to pull us in the exact opposite direction, that is, towards the other. The task at hand in 1935, was not one of self assertion as a Kshatriya, but to emulate a villager. This villager admittedly remained undifferentiated and hazy in Gandhi’s thought, but lived a life of unremitting labour, bereft of the resources to adequately reproduce the self. The village improvement worker’s house then was not a form of self-expression. Rather, a fragile house rendered intelligible the villagers’ inability to effectively make and remake themselves on a daily basis. The house was a space of labour.

Bapu Kuti was a rather strange place. The Sewagram building came replete with a verandah, a living room, a store-room, a toilet, and even a massage room. The living room, for its part, was portioned out into three sections: a central seating area for Gandhi and Kasturba, flanked by subsidiary spaces for Mahadev Desai and visitors on either side. While it was a house that was re-proportioned by Madeleine Slade to suit Gandhi’s needs, “a proper cottage for Bapu,” its material constitution and spatial allocations also draw attention to its instability and inadequacy as a private space. One can argue therefore that Bapu Kuti was not the space for the self, but the space of the villagers who did not possess a reassured place for social reproduction. In other words, Bapu Kuti was not Gandhi’s “house,” in as much as it may have rendered him homeless.

Plan of Bapu Kuti. Photo credit: Reproduction by LA: Journal of Landscape Architecture

If Bapu Kuti’s architecture, and Gandhi’s injunctions for village improvement work are anything to go by, the task of conserving or reproducing a Gandhian architecture in the present must, of necessity, extend beyond an architecture of permanence for Gandhi’s own ashrams, and embrace those bereft of the resources to adequately reproduce themselves. As we know only too starkly from the pandemic-led exodus of workers from the cities, such people are never too far from us. The conditions of lakhs of construction labourers working on so-called world-class building sites in India, without the benefit of shelter or a quiet place of their own, are not too different from those of the villagers of Gandhi’s imagination in 1935. What might a Sabarmati ashram dedicated to the construction labourers of Ahmedabad look like?

Venugopal Maddipati is an architectural historian who teaches at the School of Design, Ambedkar University, New Delhi. He is the author of Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing.

From Sea-Plane Ride to Berlin Station Visit, Modi Has Played Fast and Loose With Security Drill

While a post-mortem of the Punjab fiasco must be carried out, this isn’t the first breach to have taken place. Former SPG personnel say Modi loves to call the shots, often riding roughshod over the advice of his security detail.

New Delhi: As the Supreme Court wades into the controversy surrounding the alleged breach of Prime Minister Modi’s security in Punjab and sparks fly between the Union and state governments, many in the security establishment are wondering why other breaches of prime ministerial security protocol – mainly involving the present incumbent – never attracted the same political or media attention

Former SPG personnel say it is Narendra Modi who loves to call the shots, often riding roughshod over the advice of his security detail. The one example they uniformly cite is when he insisted on flying in a single engine sea plane with a foreign pilot who had no security clearance – a strict no-no as per the Special Protection Group’s blue book.

Denied permission for a road show during the 2017 assembly elections, the prime minister decided to travel on a sea plane from the Sabarmati riverfront to Dharoi Dam in Mehsana district. At the time and subsequently, officials, both retired and serving, had no explanation for how and why Modi was allowed to fly in a single engine plane.

However, no heads rolled following the sea plane episode. The reason, says a former Union home secretary, is because “violations of the blue book are usually at the behest of the VVIP and they happen on a monthly basis. These violations are brought to the notice of the PMO and the PM by the SPG and left at that.”

The SPG’s security bible – which takes its name from the light cobalt blue colour of its cover – is a 200 page set of instructions and annexures with the minutest detail of the premier’s security. Last updated 18 years ago, a fresh draft is awaiting Ministry of Home Affairs approval. In keeping with the changing times, the updated blue book will also incorporate changes brought about in the PM’s security following the 2008 Mumbai terror attack.

There have also been times when the SPG has been forced to put its foot down in the face of the prime minister’s demands. During one particular foreign visit he made in the first year of his tenure as PM – The Wire is withholding the name of the country to protect its sources – Modi decided he wanted to stop his convoy and mingle with the crowds. However, the intelligence agencies had already picked up chatter indicating there could be an attempt to assassinate the PM from “close quarters” and that the danger was “clear and present”. When Modi said he wanted to step out, the head of the close proximity team travelling in the PM’s car insisted on consulting the SPG chief who was in the car behind. The instructions of the SPG chief were clear: Under no circumstances was the convoy to make an unscheduled stop. If this order was disobeyed, the officer would be dismissed from service on the spot for disobeying government orders. The convoy carried on. It was the SPG chief who later faced the music.

It’s not just the SPG that has been forced to rebuff Modi’s demands. In 2015, during a visit to Germany, Modi insisted on visiting Berlin railway station. He said he wanted to study the workings of a modern rail terminal. Given the footfall and the public nature of the station, German security turned down the request, saying it would be impossible for them to sanitise a place like that. Despite this, the prime minister had his way and undertook the visit, presenting the SPG with a huge challenge.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi visiting a railway station in Berlin in 2015. Photo: PTI

Security personnel also say that the prime minister’s penchant for changing the security drill has sometimes extended to visiting dignitaries as well. In 2017, Japanese security was aghast when told that their prime minister, Shinzo Abe, would have to travel in an open jeep during a visit to the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat. Ultimately, the Japanese side acquiesced, and Abe travelled alongside Modi in an open Gypsy bedecked with marigold. The Japan PM in Indian attire completed the desired photo-op.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie Abe ride an open vehicle during their roadshow in Ahmedabad in 2017. Photo: PTI

But there have been instances when the security arrangements of Modi’s predecessors were also found wanting. In 2012, the advanced security liaison of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was leaked before his visit to Thailand because the communication was sent via an unsecured line. This breach was brought to light by the NTRO during a cyber audit of the SPG. This reporter has viewed the letter written by the NTRO to the SPG.

Punjab post-mortem will reveal deviations from blue book

While Prime Minister Modi’s motorcade has been held up before – in Noida and in Delhi – without generating hype about a threat to his life, a post-mortem of the Punjab incident is needed to plug systemic gaps and ensure there is no repeat anywhere else in the country, say experts.

Former CIC DP Sinha, who as an Intelligence Bureau official had attended advanced security liaison meetings all across the country for the past three decades, says, “Everything is laid out in the blue book. And if there has been a security violation, then too responsibility has to be fixed as per the blue book. When it is the prime minister that we are talking of, nothing is left to chance.”

But there is a lot more in the blue book that both the Union government and the state government need to answer for.

For instance, as per the advance security liaisoning (ASL), were inputs not taken from the meteorological department about the possibility of rain? If the weather turned inclement and a chopper ride to the venue was not possible, then was the contingency route not decided as per the ASL? Was this contingency route the one the PM took?

Did the SPG really allow the prime minister to travel on an unsanitised route for two hours without security clearance? As per the blue book, the SPG doesn’t move till the state police concerned gives the go ahead that the entire route is sanitised.

Screengrab from the video showing BJP workers near Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cavalcade on January 5 on the Moga-Ferozepur highway in Punjab. Photo: Twitter.

In the Supreme Court, solicitor general Tushar Mehta tried to lay blame at the state’s door step. “Whenever the PM’s cavalcade moves on the road, it is always the DG of the state who is consulted and only with his sanction does it proceed.” Mehta says the “DG gave the green signal. He did not say there is a blockade.” If this is so, then the DGP needs to answer. And, in turn, so do his subordinates, who would have handled specific stretches.

But the prime ministerial cavalcade includes a warning car and a pilot car. Wouldn’t the first car have noticed a crowd and conveyed a message immediately? Why, then, did the cavalcade stop so close to the site of the blockage, with the traffic jam caused by the protestors within easy visual range? If it apprehended a threat, should the SPG not have made an immediate U-turn to put some distance between the cavalcade and traffic jam ahead, instead of waiting for 20 minutes?

Mehta admitted in court that the warning car was about 500-700 metres ahead of the convoy but did not tell the court whether the convoy was alerted by the pilot. He instead said, “the motorcade came to know only when it was on the flyover”. And then proceeded to blame the waiting policemen who he says were enjoying tea. “They did not alert the warning car that there was a blockade!”

It is also not clear why civilians had gathered in such numbers on either side of the carriageway. The bifurcated four lane highway had only one carriageway closed to traffic while the other had motorists and BJP flag bearers shouting slogans. Says a former IB official, “Traffic is allowed on the opposite side depending on the threat perception, proximity to the border and traffic density. Only the ASL will make clear what was decided but normally in a border state both carriageways should be stopped. Here, it seems, one side was left open to allow BJP supporters to reach the site of the prime minister’s planned rally.

But once the convoy made a U turn and started travelling on the wrong side of the road, traffic on the route should have been stopped by the state police till the convoy made it to the right carriageway which was not done. “This entire fiasco is unprecedented,” say experts.

Gujarat HC Uses Public Trust Doctrine to Safeguard Sabarmati River From Pollution

The high court has issued a slew of interim directions to the authorities to prevent further harm to the river.

New Delhi: The Gujarat high court bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Vaibhavi D. Nanavati, on September 23, used the ‘public trust’ doctrine to hold the state government responsible for stopping municipal councils and industries from soiling the water bodies in the Sabarmati river.

“In our Constitution, water resources are held in public trust. We have to use the “Public Trust Doctrine’ to apply stringent provisions against permitting municipal bodies or industries from polluting rivers,” the bench observed in its interim order.

The bench had in August taken suo motu cognisance based on media reports that sewage water was not being treated in accordance with the set norms at the sewage treatment plant (STP) at Pirana in Ahmedabad and that polluted water was being released into the Sabarmati river. The bench had then ordered the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) to carry out a thorough inspection to detect effluent pipelines through which industrial waste is discharged into sewage lines. The bench sought necessary action against all the errant industrial units.

Expressing dissatisfaction with the GPCB’s record, the bench had observed that those in power were protecting the polluters.

On September 23, the bench, after hearing the counsel and having gone through the materials on record, expressed its view that very urgent steps are required to be taken to save the river before it is too late. “A stretch of almost 120 km of the river is dead including the portion of the Sabarmati Riverfront,” the bench observed.

The high court has earlier constituted a Joint Task Force (JTF) comprising officials from different agencies to deal with the situation. The JTF members agreed that the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) should initiate extensive drive to identify the industries discharging the effluent into the sewerage network without permission and also to initiate appropriate action. The GPCB and the police department were asked to work in coordination to keep in check any unauthorised disposal through tankers or tractors in the area.

Also read: Telangana HC’s Landmark Order Extending Crop Compensation to Tenant Farmers Gives Hope

In a significant direction, the bench held that the principle of collective responsibility shall be imposed on the industrial estates and/or industries located within the vicinity of each other. The industrial associations shall take the responsibility for the misdeeds of its members, the bench has held. “The illegality committed by one industry shall result into collective penalties such as payments against pollution, i.e. on the principle of ‘polluter pays’, disconnection of the electricity supply in clusters from where the pollution originates, etc.,” the bench held.

The bench directed that the discharge points, i.e. the place where the industrial effluents arrive at the treatment centres and are thereafter discharged into the sewerage network or river outlet post treatment, shall be monitored in real time by the CCTV cameras and Supervisory Control and Date Acquisition (SCADA) apparatus/system at the specific points so as to localise and identify the source of discharge of the untreated industrial waste/effluents and inform the concerned authorities at the earliest.

The bench, in an effort to name and shame the polluter, also empowered the JTF members to publish in the newspapers the details of the set-up/industry along with the name of the owner running such set-up guilty of releasing untreated effluent wastewater into the sewer line maintained by the AMC. “The cost incurred for the publication of the name of such defaulter shall be borne by the AMC and the same shall be recovered from the erring defaulter by way of arrears under the land revenue at the earliest,” the bench held.

The bench added that if such an erring defaulter is outside the limits of the AMC, then the name of such an erring defaulter shall be published by the collector, Ahmedabad, in the newspapers. The expense that may be incurred for such publication shall be borne by the collector, and the same shall be recovered from the erring defaulter by way of arrears under the land revenue at the earliest, the bench directed.

If any particular industry is caught flouting the norms or is found indulging in dubious practice or methods of discharging their trade effluents, such industry shall not be permitted to participate in any industrial fair, public private partnership events, etc., the bench held.

Upon directions that may be issued by the members of the JTF, the electricity connection of such erring set-up/industrial unit shall be disconnected immediately and no re-connection shall be made nor any new connection shall be granted under any other name on the existing premises without the prior permission of the AMC and the GPCB, the interim order issued by the bench reads.

The bench directed the AMC to disconnect the water and the drainage connections of such erring set-up/industrial units which release partially treated/untreated wastewater. No reconnection shall be granted by the AMC without the prior approval of the GPCB, the bench categorically held.

The Sabarmati thermal power station, on the banks of the river. Photo: Koshy Koshy/Flickr CC BY 2.0

The bench also directed the JTF to actively involve the law enforcement agencies to stop the movement of industrial effluents in tankers at odd hours. The bench directed the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) to take steps to provide drainage connections to the industries so that the sewage water can be used in the various Common Effluent Treatment Plants (CETPs) for dilution of the industrial effluents at the outset, in order to reduce the problem of industrial contamination.

The bench directed the GPCB to monitor the waste water generation of industries in accordance with the production capacity of each industry so as to assess if the industrial effluents are being illegally discharged in the sewage network or not.

The next hearing of the case is to be listed before the same bench on October 21.

Public trust doctrine

The interim order of the high court on September 23 brings focus on the ‘public trust doctrine’, which the Indian Supreme Court borrowed from American case law in the Span Motels case. In 1995, Span Motels built a resort on the bank of the Beas river between Kullu and Manali in Himachal Pradesh. The former Union minister and Congress leader, Kamal Nath, had links to the hotelier, who had encroached a swathe of forest land. The encroachment was ‘validated’ in 1993-94, during Kamal Nath’s tenure as minister. During the 1995 monsoon, the river engulfed part of the land and threatened the resort. In an effort to protect its property, both before and after the 1995 floods, Span Motels carried out substantial work (dredging, construction of concrete barriers, wire crates, etc.) to deflect the flow of the river. Justice Kuldip Singh of the Supreme Court was only a couple of weeks from retirement when he delivered the judgment in the case on December 13, 1996.

As Justice Kuldip Singh held, the public trust doctrine primarily rests on the principle that certain resources like air, sea, waters and the forests have such a great importance to the people as a whole that it would be wholly unjustified to make them a subject of private ownership. The said resources, being a gift of nature, should be made freely available to everyone irrespective of their status in life. The doctrine enjoins upon the government to protect resources for the enjoyment of the general public rather than to permit their use for private ownership or commercial purposes.

Also read: The Police Did Not Bungle in Assam, They Committed a Horrific Crime

In this case, the Supreme Court quashed the prior approval granted by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests in 1993 and the lease deed in favour of the motel. The court directed the Himachal Pradesh government to take over the area and restore it to its original-natural conditions. The court directed the motel to pay compensation by way of cost for the restitution of the environment and ecology of the area. The court held that the pollution caused by various constructions made by the motel in the riverbed and the banks of River Beas had to be removed and reversed. The motel was asked to show cause why a pollution fine, in addition, not be imposed on it.

The Supreme Court has applied the public trust doctrine in several cases since then. In the latest case, which challenged the construction of the Central Vista Project, the petitioners contended that a transient government holds the resources in trust for the public and they can only be utilised for the benefit of the public. Relying on American case law, the petitioners further argued that the doctrine extends to properties which are of “special consequence” and extending the same logic, they urged that Central Vista is of special consequence for the nation, thereby calling for a high threshold of due process. To further their argument of suppression of public trust, the petitioners urged that the bid document reveals that the decision of constructing a new Parliament building or to renovate the existing building was left to be decided by the private consultant, and entrusting a private consultant with a fundamental decision of this nature does not fall in sync with the principles of public trust.

While deciding this case, however, the Supreme Court emphasised that the practical understanding of this doctrine entails a balance between protection and maximum beneficial use of resources. Relying on the recent American literature on the doctrine, the Supreme Court reasoned that the case law demonstrates that this approach has left space for commercial uses of public resources.

The public trust doctrine, the court interpreted in this case, does not prohibit beneficial use of public resources. “The scale would not tilt towards status quo and retention of the existing condition of public property when the proposed use is for legitimate development and creation of assets and in public interest…,” the Supreme Court held in this case.

In any case, the latest interpretation of the doctrine by the Supreme Court in the Central Vista project case has no relevance to the Sabarmati river pollution case before the Gujarat high court. The high court, having rightly invoked the doctrine in its interim order, will hopefully take it to its logical culmination to ensure that its directions to keep the Sabarmati free from pollution are complied with by the authorities.

Gujarat: No Environment Nod, Work Starts on Seaplane Service Between Sabarmati, Statue of Unity

The start of work on a floating jetty on the Sabarmati riverfront violates the environment ministry’s rules. There are also claims that the service will be inaugurated on October 31.

On Saturday, September 12, parts of a floating jetty were transported in trucks to Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati riverfront.

On Sunday, September 13, despite the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the city, a crowd gathered at the riverfront to watch the unloading of the trucks and the commencement of work on the jetty.

This jetty will be part of the water aerodrome at the Ahmedabad end of Gujarat’s first seaplane service, intended to fly between the Sabarmati riverfront and the Statue of Unity in Kevadia. The service will apparently be inaugurated on October 31 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in commemoration of Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary. A seaplane ride between the water aerodromes on the Sabarmati and in Kevadia will cost Rs 4,800.

The beginning of work on the floating jetty in Ahmedabad, the suggestion that the seaplane service will be inaugurated on October 31 and the stated cost of a ticket for the seaplane all hide a certain fact: none of these things are legitimate at this point, because neither the seaplane service nor the two water aerodromes at either end have as yet obtained the environmental clearances they require.

These clearances have been applied for, but are pending. If proper procedure is followed under the rules of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), they will remain pending for quite a while longer, making the start of work on these projects at this time a violation of the Environment Impact Assessment Notification 2006.

The environment clearance procedure

On August 27, 2020, the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) of the MoEF&CC discussed via video conference the terms of reference with regard to the development of the water aerodrome at Sabarmati Riverfront, Paldi, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, by the civil aviation department of the government of Gujarat.

This had followed a similar discussion in April this year regarding the water aerodrome project near the Statue of Unity, Panchmukhi Lake (Lake 3) of Sardar Sarovar Dam at Limdi village, Narmada district.

Also read: Investigation Shows Sabarmati Is Brimming With Stagnant Water

The minutes of both these EAC meetings in April 2020 and August 2020 show that the EAC had added an additional term of reference to the standard terms of reference that had been specified by the MoEF&CC in April 2015. This addition called for a public hearing on the construction of each water aerodrome – at Kevadia, near the Statue of Unity and at the Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad – given that they may impact “air, water and aquatic biodiversity”.

According to the minutes of both EAC meetings, “Public hearing is to be conducted. Issues raised during public hearing and commitments made by the project proponent on such issues should be included in final EIA/EMP Report [environmental impact assessment and environmental management plan] in the form of tabular chart with financial budget for complying with such commitments (sic).”

Sabarmati Riverfront. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sabarmati Riverfront. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The EAC felt such public hearings were necessary because, “The Water Aerodrome is not a listed project/activity in the Schedule to the EIA Notification, 2006 and its amendments. However, a view has been taken by this EAC that the activities proposed under Water Aerodrome project may have similar type of impacts as that of the Airport. Considering the Water Aerodrome are emerging in the country as new mode of transport involving sea/river fronts and its likely impacts on water, air and aquatic biodiversity including flora and fauna, the EAC has also taken a view to follow the EC [environmental clearance] process as per category A of item 7(a) ‘Air Ports’ of the Schedule to the EIA Notification, 2006 (sic).”

In simple terms, any project that needs to obtain environmental clearance (EC) must go through the following procedure:

A discussion by the EAC on the project which sets the terms of reference.
An assessment of the environmental impact of the project, which usually takes two seasons to complete;
The submission of the report on the environmental impact of the project and its environmental management plan to the MoEF&CC and the pollution control board of the state in which the project is located;
If a public hearing had been included in the project’s terms of reference, a 30-day notice period by the state pollution control board via advertisements for the public to comment, agree or disagree on the implementation of the project;
The public hearing;
The submission of minutes and video recordings of the proceedings of the public hearing to the MoEF&CC;
A further discussion by the EAC after the public hearing on whether or not to grant the environmental clearance.
Finally, the granting or withholding of the EC.

Only once the EC is granted can work begin on the project. But except for the two EAC meetings – in April this year for the Kevadia water aerodrome and in August 2020 for the Sabarmati riverfront water aerodrome – this procedure has so far not been followed.

Did the government make an assumption?

Since neither the EIA and EMP reports have been submitted to the MoEF&CC and state pollution control board so far and nor have the two public hearings been held, the beginning of work on the floating jetty in Ahmedabad and the suggestion that the seaplane service will be inaugurated on October 31 appears to show that the Gujarat government has assumed the environmental clearances will be granted no matter what impact the project might have on the “air, water and aquatic biodiversity” of these areas.

Also read: Official Plan to Make Sabarmati Gandhi Ashram ‘World Class’ Instils Fear in Residents

Reading between the lines of the additional term of reference, this assumption seems to have been made right at the beginning of the EC procedure, with the reference to a “financial budget”. The minutes of the EAC meetings in April 2020 and August 2020 had both stated: “Public hearing is to be conducted. Issues raised during public hearing and commitments made by the project proponent on such issues should be included in final EIA/EMP Report in the form of tabular chart with financial budget for complying with such commitments (sic).”

The seaplane service launch announcement and the beginning of work on the floating jetty at Ahmedabad are thus both blatant violations of the Centre’s Environment Impact Assessment Notification 2006 and a mockery of India’s stated commitment to environmental conservation in the light of the climate crisis.

The impact on Kevadia

In February 2019, Pon Radhakrishnan, minister of state for shipping, had informed parliament that seaplane services would be started in six places.

But why begin the services in Kevadia, Gujarat, where the local Adivasi community could never hope to use it? Could it be that the Centre is following in the footsteps of the so-called ‘developed’ world, where native populations were systematically displaced in the name of ‘development’?

Also read: Gujarat: Sardar Sarovar Dam, Statue of Unity Made Tadvi Adivasis Encroachers on their Own Lands

The statue of Sardar Patel and its associated ‘projects’ have today become symbols of resource destruction, river mismanagement and the subjugation of the indigenous population. All this in the name of ‘unity’.

If he were still alive at this time, Sardar Patel, one of the founders of the India that emerged out of British colonialism, would not appreciate these gestures.

Rohit Prajapati is an environment activist, researcher and writer. Krishnakant is an environment activist.

Modi, Xi Jinping and Six Years of Battle for the Psychological High Ground

The optimism around the Chinese president’s visit in 2014 was quite evidently misplaced. Modi’s weakness at every moment of tension has only whetted Xi’s appetite further.

Precisely six years ago, on September 17, 2014, Ahmedabad and New Delhi were abuzz with the visit of Chinese president, Xi Jinping and his wife, folk singer Peng Liyuan. Televisions channels played an extended video loop of Prime Minister Narendra Modi sitting on a swing with Xi on the banks of the Sabarmati River, while excited anchors foretold an era of Sino-Indian peace, forged between the two strongmen who had come to power within two years of each other.

Six years later, the Modi-Xi relationship lies in tatters, as do ties between New Delhi and Beijing. With Chinese soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) having marched across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in May and occupied territory that the Indian army has traditionally controlled and patrolled, many Indians now see Xi and China as not just adversaries, but as implacable foes.

For the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Modi’s failure to befriend Xi, or to achieve the holy grail of a border settlement, constitutes a huge political embarrassment. There has been no movement on a boundary settlement since 2005, when China consented to sign off on a set of “political parameters” that would govern the final solution. Now the opposition is painting Modi as a trusting simpleton who has been duped by the cunning Chinese leader.

The optimism around Xi’s visit was, in fact, quite evidently misplaced. Even as Modi poured tea for Xi in Ahmedabad, Beijing was testing the Indian PM by sending 1,000 troops across the LAC in Chumar, in Southern Ladakh.

According to India’s foreign ministry, Modi sternly told Xi that such incidents would inevitably affect the larger relationship. With the PLA’s withdrawal from Chumar, the Indian PM continued believing his parity with Xi could result in the resolution of Sino-Indian disharmony.

In May 2015, during his three-day visit to China, Modi pressed Xi again on the border question when they met in Xi’an. Officials familiar with the conversation say Xi did not even respond. Instead, in Beijing the next day, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang delivered Modi a lecture featuring Beijing’s boilerplate formulation that the border question was a “complex issue left over from history” and that solving it required “patience.”

Through 2015 and 2016, Modi was preoccupied with his growing embrace of the US. In January 2015, President Barack Obama and Modi signed a “Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region”. Taking the US-India partnership beyond the 2014 Vision Statement and 2015 Declaration of Friendship, Modi and Obama “resolved that the United States and India should look to each other as priority partners in the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean region.”

Meanwhile, defence ministers Manohar Parrikar and his US counterpart, Ashton Carter, kicked off a US-India Maritime Security Dialogue and signed the Defence Technology and Trade Agreement (DTTI) and a long-delayed Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) and Communications Compatibility And Security Agreement (COMCASA). Washington also designated India a Major Defence Partner, opening the doors for selling India high-technology military hardware.

Washington also strongly backed New Delhi’s entry into the four global non-proliferation agreements: the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australia Group, the Wassenaar Arrangement and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

A fuming Beijing signalled its displeasure. China blocked India’s candidature for NSG membership and placed a “technical hold” on the designation of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar as a global terrorist in the United Nations. The estrangement gathered momentum with New Delhi’s refusal in 2017 to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – China’s flagship infrastructure building project.

The subterranean tussle between Modi and Xi came to a head in Doklam in 2017, when Indian troops intervened in territory that is disputed between China and Bhutan to block China’s road building for 73 tense days. The exceptionally aggressive messaging from China during the crisis suggests that Xi himself assumed control of events at some stage of the confrontation. A mutual pull-back was negotiated, but China eventually got its way by re-entering the disputed Doklam bowl later, which India did not contest.

“That was a clear message from China’s top leader,” says a top official, now retired, who served in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). “Xi was telling Modi that you cannot prevent China from taking what we think is ours.”

Modi got the message and did a truce at Wuhan in April 2018. Following that, New Delhi implemented measures to placate Xi, including reining in the Tibetan diaspora. Modi spoke in June 2018 at the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore, echoing Beijing in appealing against a “return to the age of great power rivalries” in the Indo-Pacific – effectively stating that the US had no place the region.

A former foreign secretary, speaking on condition of anonymity, believes that this evidence of Modi’s weakness only whetted Xi’s appetite. The Chinese leader concluded that he was succeeding in establishing psychological dominance over the Indian PM. And Xi wanted to consolidate that pre-eminence.

The Chinese leader perceived a perfect opportunity in the circumstances that prevailing in April: a raging COVID-19 pandemic, New Delhi’s weakened position in the sub-continent, India’s unprecedented economic slowdown and America’s inward preoccupation with the bruising 2020 election battle.

“Besides affirming his paramountcy over Modi, Xi would also have aimed to show Washington that its putative regional partner could not even safeguard its territory from China. Finally, Xi also wanted to show regional countries India’s subordinate place,” says the former PMO official.

That Modi is confused and browbeaten became evident after the killing of 20 Indian soldiers in June, when he denied any Chinese intrusions into Indian territory. His statement implied that none of the territory the PLA had occupied belonged to India, and also that the Indian soldiers were killed on Chinese territory.

The Chinese media quickly picked up this theme. “Modi’s remarks will be very helpful to ease the tensions because, as the Prime Minister of India, he has removed the moral basis for hardliners to further accuse China” wrote Global Times, quoting Lin Minwang of Fudan University.

There was similar policy incoherence in defence minister Rajnath Singh’s statement in Parliament on Tuesday, when he stated that peace and tranquillity would prevail if the Chinese disengaged. That implied that India’s claim over Aksai Chin was no longer crucial.

Even more startling was Rajnath’s omission of Depsang from the list of places where the PLA had trespassed into Indian claimed territory. “If Modi was more in control, I would have thought that signalled a package deal that involved making concessions in Depsang in exchange for Chinese concessions elsewhere. But, given Modi’s lack of visible leadership in a national crisis, Xi seems to have won,” said a former foreign secretary who did not want to be named.

Even Before Trump’s Visit, Ahmedabad Has Been Key in the Image Modi Wants to Portray

It’s the city where the much-touted Gujarat Model crystallised, merging masculinist Hindu (sub)nationalism with elite-friendly developmentalism.

Ahmedabad has been at the centre-stage of India’s diplomatic engagements ever since Narendra Modi’s prime ministership began in 2014. Time and again, Modi has personally and quite warmly hosted world leaders in Ahmedabad, including Xi Jinping, Shinzo Abe and Benjamin Netanyahu. This list has just found a new name on it: Donald Trump, whose visit will cost 1.5% of Gujarat’s annual budget for maintaining law and order.

Barring Abe, all other foreign leaders hosted in Ahmedabad have common dictatorial traits – ranging from suppression of dissent and xenophobia to referring to one’s self in the third person.

It’s almost as if Modi’s diplomatic realpolitik has installed Ahmedabad as a “city in the world”, to use the title of Amrita Shah’s biography on the city.

If Gujarat is the laboratory of Hindutva politics, then Ahmedabad is where Modi personally experimented with development (capital) and Gujarati asmita (pride). It’s the city where the much-touted Gujarat Model crystallised, merging masculinist Hindu (sub)nationalism with elite-friendly developmentalism. It’s where an anti-Muslim and anti-poor urbanism took shape at the behest of Modi’s socio-economic policies. For instance, Hindus and Muslims are not allowed to transact residential properties to each other in many parts of Ahmedabad without government sanction.

Politics by spectacle

Sabarmati river’s gentrified waterfront in Ahmedabad, where Xi was hosted in 2014 and from where Modi-Trump’s cavalcades will pass by during their roadshow, epitomises this development model of Gujarat.

Sabarmati river has been central to Gujarat’s and India’s political imagination. Ahmed Shah I of the Gujarat Sultanate decided to establish Ahmedabad – lending his name to the city – on the banks of the Sabarmati for political and economic reasons. Home to diverse religious groups, Ahmedabad became one of the ten most populous cities in the world in the later part of the 17th century (and remained in this league for close to seven decades). In contemporary times, Sabarmati is remembered in public memory through M.K. Gandhi, often called the Saint of Sabarmati, who established an Ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati, where he stayed for 13 years of his life.

During his chief ministership (2001-14), Modi, with the help of architect Bimal Patel, transformed the riverfront in Ahmedabad. This new schema of urban planning, in essence, converted Sabarmati river into an artificially managed lake causing tremendous ecological damage. In the process, over 10,000 houses of slum-dwellers were demolished, without a well-thought relief and rehabilitation programme. These slum-dwellers, Hindus and Muslims alike, were resettled only after civil society’s intervention. However, Gujarat’s Hindutva politics ensured slum-dwellers’ segregation on religious lines at relocated sites, breaking inter-community bonds of several decades.

Narendra Modi with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife at the Sabarmati riverfront. Photo: PTI/Files

Now, the Sabarmati riverfront in Ahmedabad features an event centre, multiple parks, a cycling track and special zones for recreational activities (including once-in-a-while zumba classes), among others. Various empty patches of reclaimed land are up for sale to build luxurious hotels and upscale commercial spaces. In December 2017, two days before much of Gujarat went to polls, Modi flew in a sea-plane from this waterfront to freshen up the memory of Gujaratis about his developmental model.

Likewise, in the late-2000s, Kankaria Lake which fell in the Vidhan Sabha constituency represented by Modi was re-developed on similar lines, restricting entry to a public site through a ticket.

Motera cricket stadium, where Trump and Modi will address over one lakh people, is another such site of spectacle. Motera Stadium has been the epicentre of political battles – from Modi’s personal rivalry with Narhari Amin to the stadium’s successful takeover by Amit Shah and his son Jay Shah. The theme of displacement witnessed during the re-development of Sabarmati riverfront recurs here: just days before Trump’s visit, slum-dwellers living next to the cricket stadium have been asked to vacate their houses.

Using Gandhi and his Ashram

On top of displaying the re-developed (not so) public spaces of Ahmedabad, Modi has used these visits by foreign leaders to introduce a new phase in his public image.

For example, in the immediate aftermath of 2002 anti-Muslim carnage, Modi projected himself as a Hindu Hriday Samrat (King of Hindu hearts) for whom interests of Hindus mattered the most. Later on, in his bid to foster support in Gujarat and nationally, he fashioned himself as a Vikas Purush (development man). Sites like the Sabarmati Riverfront, Kankaria Lake, GIFT city, alongside Vibrant Gujarat bi-annual investor meets and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) for industries were central to this new narrative of developmentalism (with a subtle anti-Muslim messaging for the constituency lured by Hindutva).

Also read: Has Modi Learnt to Play Trump Better? A Look at Possible Deliverables Beyond Motera

However, after his elevation to the national scene, Modi has increasingly presented himself as a saintly figure – someone who is above the Machiavellianism of everyday politics and has left the murky political dealings to lieutenants like Amit Shah, Ajit Doval and Yogi Adityanath.

In this new trajectory of public life, Modi exhibits personal affection to Gandhi and his ideology, at least in words if not in deeds. To do so, Modi privileges certain ideals espoused by Gandhi such as cleanliness, ignoring other crucial principles of Gandhi’s ideology, including Hindu-Muslim harmony and economic self-reliance.

Almost immediately after becoming India’s prime minister in 2014, Modi launched a nationwide cleanliness and sanitation initiative, Swachh Bharat Mission, based on Gandhi’s moral doctrine.

When China’s Xi visited Ahmedabad in September 2014, Modi took him on a personal tour of Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram before settling down for an entertainment programme at the Sabarmati Riverfront. Similarly, he accompanied Netanyahu and Abe to the Sabarmati Ashram. It is still unclear whether Trump will visit the Sabarmati Ashram or not. Interestingly, Modi did not give company to Canada’s Justin Trudeau – whose centrist ideological bearings put him at odds with Modi’s — on his visit to Sabarmati Ashram.

Senior police officials arrive to examine security arrangement at Gandhi Ashram, where U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to visit during his trip to India later this month, in Ahmedabad, India, February 13, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Amit Dave/File Photo

On October 2, 2019, Gandhi’s 150 birth anniversary, Modi paid tributes to Gandhi by visiting the Sabarmati Ashram while the Union government announced a plan to re-develop the Ashram at the cost of Rs 287 crore. This renovation plan – whose final sketch has been prepared by Bimal Patel – envisages to restore Sabarmati Ashram to its original shape and make it tourist-friendly. Residents living in the Ashram precincts fear eviction of the kind faced by slum-dwellers with the Sabarmati Riverfront project.

Also read: A US-India Trade Deal Can Only be Sealed if Both Move Past Clearly Defined Red Lines

If the plan to re-develop Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram goes through, it will only embolden Modi’s claim to be the most genuine custodian of Gandhi’s legacy – and host more foreign leaders at the Ashram.

All in all, Modi in these visits showcases a hyper-capitalist city to foreign leaders where finance capital and industries call the shots; where public spaces are specially reserved for urban middle-classes and elites; where the poor are hidden behind a smokescreen-like wall, physical or otherwise; where Muslims are pushed to ghettoes, including India’s largest called Juhapura; where historical facts are deliberately turned upside down for political ends; where the world of politics is invariably communal.

Sharik Laliwala is a researcher on contemporary Gujarat’s politics and history. He has been associated with Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi and Ashoka University, Sonepat.

How Gandhi turned a 21st Century Classroom Into an Empathy-Filled Community

A vivid demonstration of the power and efficacy of Gandhi’s message of truth, courage and non-violence.

Bullying is a very real source of concern for schools everywhere. Defined as ‘the act of repeatedly and intentionally causing hurt or harm over a period of time to another person or group of people who feel helpless to respond’, it is pronounced in some schools and subtle in others.

It is a sad commentary on the priorities of the Indian school system that the vast majority of middle and high school students do not feel their classrooms are emotionally safe spaces. Sincere and well-meaning teachers address the problem the best they can, but the sheer weight of a yet-to-be-finished curriculum and the many other challenges that they face on a daily basis leave most of them with little or no time to address crucial interpersonal issues that a lot of their students face.

As someone who conducts anti-bullying programmes, I am always on the lookout for tools I can offer schools to tackle the problem. This Gandhi Jayanti, a friend gave me a brand new idea. He told me that on October 2, he and his wife turned their living room into a mini movie theatre for the day, and held a special screening of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi for his son’s classmates and their families.

Also read: ‘How Did Gandhiji Kill Himself?’ Asks Gujarat School in Exam

It turned into an all-day affair with lunch, popcorn and a freewheeling discussion afterwards. Despite the movie being quite long, the children and parents who attended the screening sat through the whole thing without getting bored. Even the parents in the audience with pronounced Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and BJP leanings watched the movie quietly and respectfully.

“It’s difficult to argue with a man’s life, isn’t it?” my friend noted with a smile.

Inspired by how my friend and his wife had commemorated the Mahatma’s birthday, I wondered if Gandhi would speak just as clearly and powerfully to an adolescent school audience as well.

Could his message of truth, courage and non-violence help to stem the epidemic of bullying that so many schools today are facing?

The very next day, a co-teacher and I got together and created the structure of a five-step workshop for students of a high school with a fairly major bullying problem. This workshop, titled ‘Catching Up With Gandhi’, would consist of the students of the most ‘difficult’ class in that school. The parameters were:

Watching the movie
Taking the time to genuinely self-introspect
Getting to know the other students in class better
Bringing up classroom issues and talking about them honestly but respectfully
Making things right with each other

We began the workshop by asking the students what they would like to change about India if they could. The answers came quick and fast – end poverty, corruption and communalism, end gender and caste-based discrimination, take concrete and far-reaching steps to curb pollution, ban firecrackers, and make India safer for women and children.

It is always heartening to see idealism alive and well in young hearts, and it most certainly belied the average stereotype of the ‘troublesome, self-centred and bored teenager’.

We then asked them if they believed it’s actually possible for a single person to make a tangible difference. Opinion was divided, but their answers were thoughtful and thought provoking. One of the best responses came from a girl who spoke after everyone else had said their bit, “Yes, one person can change the world but only if that person is truly trustworthy and has strong personal integrity.”

One could not have asked for a better introduction to Gandhi.

None of the students in this class had seen the movie before, (perhaps because they were all born after the start of the 21^st century?). As they settled down to follow the events of Gandhi’s life from Tolstoy farm to Sabarmati, from Champaran to Dandi, from the Round Table Conference to the riots in Calcutta, and from the horrors of the Partition to his assassination at Birla House, we were struck by their complete attentiveness.

It was remarkable to see a class full of ‘digital natives’ steeped in the world of smartphones and sound bites – and with ostensibly short attention spans – watch a lengthy 1982 movie in near total silence. Gandhi is a powerful movie and though it depicts a particular era of Indian history, it also has what it takes to hold the attention of those born three or four generations later.

The silence continued for several long minutes after the movie ended and we realised we had just witnessed the truth of Einstein’s words:

“Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”

With the impact of the movie still fresh on everyone’s minds, we asked the students to “do the Gandhi thing” and take a ‘moral inventory’ of their own lives, examine their own attitudes and see how much truth and non-violence they themselves practiced. They did so, and to our amazement, a number of them candidly and somewhat sheepishly admitted that their lives, and their behaviour towards others in particular, left much to be desired.

Also read: The Emergency, and the BJP’s Hidden History of Student Protest

Commending them for their honesty and frankness, we then asked each student to sit with someone they either did not know or did not particularly get along with and get to know them better by finding out more about their lives. We did not think these conversations would last very long, but to our happy surprise, they went on for well over an hour, and even then, showed no signs of stopping.

The simple act of sitting down with someone they did not know or like and finding out about more about them as human beings, though slightly awkward at first for some, was a powerful experience and by the time all the conversations were done, new friendships had been forged in the classroom. The students had learned to see each other as human beings and not simply as members of their own cliques and ‘sides’.

As the day drew to a close, we requested all the participants to sit in a circle and asked them to share with the rest of the class what it felt like to be in that class. After what seemed like an eternity of silence, those who had been victims of bullying in the class began to speak about their experiences – slowly and haltingly at first and then with more and more clarity and conviction as they realised it was safe for them to speak freely.

Some broke into tears while sharing their experiences, prompting others of their class to get up, walk across the room and give them a hug. Many in the classroom apologised to the bullied for having been silent bystanders and promised their peers that they would not stand by quietly again.

But the most powerful effects of satya and ahimsa, perhaps, came to the fore as the class bullies, now shamed and sobered by the realisation of what they had done also came forward and apologised to those they had bullied, making heartfelt commitments in front of the whole class that they would not hurt the others again. A more vivid demonstration of the power and efficacy of Gandhi’s message I have yet to see.

Gandhi said India lives in her villages. As a teacher, I would say the future of India lives in her classrooms. If we can teach our young people to live with empathy, honesty and non-violence, then perhaps we can salvage our collective future one class at a time, and offer a humane alternative to the darkness and bigotry we see descending all around us. An old man in a loincloth has already shown us the way. It’s up to us to follow it.

The last I checked, the students of the class have actually stopped bullying each other. Their teachers say it is a now a pleasure to be around them. Those who ate their lunch all alone in a corner of the school canteen now sit together with their other classmates in the recess. The atmosphere in the class is no longer tense and fraught. Best of all, those who are from poorer economic backgrounds no longer feel they don’t belong in the class.

The students of 10-B have become the change they wish to see in their country.

Rohit Kumar is an educator with a background in positive psychology and psychometrics. He works with high school students on emotional intelligence and adolescent issues to help make schools bullying-free zones. He can be reached at letsempathize@gmail.com

A Peek Into Ahmedabad’s Soul – A Female Perspective

A look at contemporary Ahmedabad’s cultural fabric, its violence, its poets, its food culture, its queer movement and the usage of religiosity by women to resist marginalisation.

The first part of this series dealt with broad movements in Ahmedabad’s history until India’s independence in 1947 keeping in mind and reviewing Saroop Dhruv’s recent work in Gujarati, Shahernama (Darshan, 2018). The second article outlined the post-colonial journey of Ahmedabad while continuing to examine Shahernama. This article reviews selected themes covered in Seminar magazine’s July 2018 issue titled ‘Ahmedabad: the city & her soul’.

How do women imagine a city? What are the ways in which they can claim its public spaces? Seminar magazine’s July 2018 issue titled ‘Ahmedabad: The city & her soul’ is rooted in addressing these concerns by placing perspectives by women at the centre-stage of scholarly discourse of visualising Ahmedabad, as its editor Harmony Siganporia proposes. In this piece, I review themes covered in a selected set of articles from this issue by all-women writers who have spent (at least) some period of their lives in the city.

Searching for meat in Ahmedabad

Gujarat’s chief minister Vijay Rupani expressed a bizarre desire in April 2017: to turn Gujarat into a ‘vegetarian’ society. When he made this statement in Gujarat’s legislative assembly, hundreds of Hindu priests were present to witness the passing of a law that prescribes life sentence as maximum punishment for cow slaughter. The intent of the Gujarat CM was clear: to pamper the sentiments of Hindus and Jains in an election-bound state.

Avni Sethi, an interdisciplinary artist, in her piece, staunchly contends this morality of imposed vegetarianism by narrating her personal tale of defying majoritarian norms of food culture in Ahmedabad. As a child, Sethi’s rebellious habit of taking sumptuous mutton cooked by her grandmother in school lunchbox gained her a few school friends. Simultaneously, this deviant food choice exposed Sethi to the risk of being treated as a lesser Gujarati while unsurprisingly becoming a subject of condemnatory looks when enjoying chicken in trains departing from or arriving in Ahmedabad.

Her search for meat took her to the old city of Ahmedabad. Sethi’s regular excursions to the lanes and the by-lanes of the old city have her swearing by the rich chicken and mutton delicacies available on its streets which she daringly terms as ‘essentially Gujarati food preparations’.

Something disturbing is at play in Sethi’s description of the old Ahmedabad as a ‘meat-eater’s delight’. Availability of local non-vegetarian food in the old city is a tiny feature among several ingredients which go into the making of the old city’s culture. This distorted representation of the old city which divulges little about the day to day life of its residents has become commonplace among the city’s liberal elites. These elites’ once in a while appearance in the old city from their lavish western Ahmedabad lifestyle to relish meat, or to participate in an exclusive group for heritage tour, or to celebrate the kite-flying festival of Uttarayan, has produced a ‘feel good’ cottage industry disconnected from the walled city’s culture.

Also read: Tracing the History of Ahmedabad, a City of Limited Emancipation Sethi’s write-up only reinforces this problematic ‘fetishisation’ of the old city accompanied with an incorrect and simplistic geographical segregation of Ahmedabad by the Sabarmati river into the eastern side (which she equates with the old city) and the western Ahmedabad. This separation, she claims, is further ‘accompanied by […] binaries such as minority-majority, poor-rich, etc’ assuming that the eastern side houses the marginalised communities. This is a reasoning not rooted in reality and carries the threat of treating the old city residents as a needy class requiring constant outside support.

A view of Ahmedabad. Credit: Chris Martino/Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0

In fact, eastern Ahmedabad has a substantial upwardly mobile population living outside its walled boundaries in Shahibaugh and Maninagar coupled with a working-class population in industrial areas such as Naroda, Rakhial, Vatva, to name a few. Inside the walled city, Hindus and Muslims live in next-door enclaves with a wealthy Parsi, and Dawoodi Bohra population in some parts of Khanpur area.

Vegetarianism of Gujarati society is a myth popularised by the ruling government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Sample Registration System (SRS) survey in 2014 revealed that close to 40% of the population in Gujarat state eats non-vegetarian food. Many vegetarian eaters make clandestine ventures to non-vegetarian restaurants to test a rather funny hypothesis that even a child Mohandas Gandhi believed in: that eating meat provides instant masculinity.

Of late, some openness in the food culture is visible. Sethi concurs. Ahmedabad has ‘proliferating egg laris by the hundreds’ apart from luxurious hotels serving exotic dishes such as ‘sushi and sashimi’, she notes. In 2011, KFC – an international fast-food chain – was steadfastly opposed when it tried to open its first branch in an upscale locality of Ahmedabad; the scale of this resistance has somewhat reduced in the recent past discernible in the numerous new restaurants and cafés that serve meat in western Ahmedabad localities such as Prahlad Nagar, S.G. Highway, Bopal, Thaltej and Vastrapur.

Once India’s only vegetarian Subway outlet with Jain food options, the outlet in Paldi area of Ahmedabad has begun to serve meaty sandwiches. A key reason why they made this shift was reduced profitability and demand due to a limited menu. After all, the logic of capital trumps the logic of forced moral habits.

Middle-class and Ahmedabad

The beautification project of the Sabarmati riverbank that passes through Ahmedabad, known as the Riverfront, boasts an impressive flower park, a wide track for cycling and jogging, a state-of-the-art event centre with plans to privatise the vacant land to build offices, hotels, and malls. It was once a sight of slums in which Hindus (mostly Dalits) and Muslims lived side by side. When they were removed from the city’s centre and resettled to its periphery, the slum-dwellers were divided into communal lines by the state although there was a demand for self-segregation too. Despite these glaring inequities, it is not an aberration to hear lavish praises in Ahmedabad for the Riverfront.

Mona Mehta, an academic at IIT Gandhinagar, in her article recording the middle-class dominance calls the Riverfront ‘a source of unbridled Gujarati pride for the quintessential Ahmedabadi middle class person’.

Mehta examines the event of Happy Streets held every Sunday mostly at the Riverfront to gratify the middle-class sensibilities with activities like dance, yoga, Zumba amidst talks of community building and reducing environmental pollution by declaring the Riverfront as a vehicle-free zone (which it otherwise already is). She opines that the event offers nothing more than ‘tokenistic solutions to urban problems’. Instead of showing concerns for the rehabilitated slum-dwellers, she perceptively adds, Happy Streets presents the urban middle-class as the ‘victims of urbanisation’ without any concrete plan ‘to forge a genuinely inclusive community’.

At other times, Happy Streets event has been organised at the posh commercial locality of C.G. Road and the Adani Shantigram township on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Already a private space meant for the affluent, Mehta explains that when Happy Streets is held at the Shantigram, ‘it loses all pretense of addressing the problems of urbanization’ and shifts its focus to enjoying the restricted ‘public space’ apart from, of course, marketing the real estate.

She is clear as to the cause that has solidified the middle-class hold over Ahmedabad: the neo-liberal economic arrangement arguing that the ‘Ahmedabad’s contemporary middle class has shown an acute willingness to fall in line with’ the ‘neoliberal vision’. It is unclear why she chooses not to elucidate her assertion with a discussion on the state government’s policies and programmes such as Vibrant Gujarat Summits, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), and Narendra Modi’s unique re-definition of the petite bourgeoisie as the ‘neo-middle class’.

Also read: The Rise of Hindutva Destroyed Ahmedabad’s Indigenous Capitalist TraditionsGujarat is one of the most urbanised states of India. As of 2011, roughly 43% of the state’s population is concentrated in urban areas vis-à-vis the national average of 31%. The party in power, BJP garners most votes from the urban zones – in the 2017 state elections, the urban constituencies of Ahmedabad, Surat, and Vadodara saved the BJP from a defeat. Class, reflected through deep divisions on rural-urban lines and through the movement for reservations by the powerful agrarian caste of Patel, has become central to Gujarat’s politics over caste in the few last decades. In that respect, Mehta’s thesis adds a fresh perspective – inside Ahmedabad, a quintessential urban space, class divisions, although not so visible on electoral lines, are as much relevant as they are to the state’s rural-urban divide.

Faithful and secular

The frequent incidents of large-scale communal violence in Ahmedabad beginning in the year 1969 reaching its gruesome climax with the 2002 riots has crippled the Muslims. In the absence of state-support and societal prejudice, Muslims became ghettoised and adopted conservative religious traditions seeking refuge in the divine – a phenomenon that quickened its pace from the mid-1980s. Yet, contrary to popular perceptions, Muslims did not turn towards extremism nor did they resort to violence. Heba Ahmed’s article voices this paradox central to the Gujarati Muslims adding substance to the existing researches on Islamic activism in post-2002 Ahmedabad conducted by Dipankar Gupta, T.K. Oommen, Rubina Jasani, and Raphael Susewind.

Indeed, as Ahmed writes, ‘Muslims began to make efforts at re-establishing communal harmony’ and sought justice relying on constitutional remedies after the 2002 riots. She explicates this by tracing the journey of Jameela Khan, an Islamic activist associated with Jamaat-e-Islami-Hind (JIH), who ‘dovetails both deen (religious creed) and duniya (the temporal world)’.

A practising Muslim, Jameela has a penchant for initiating religious and educational reforms among Muslims. She refuses to wear a burqa and also rejects being tagged as a feminist. Such practices, Jameela thinks, are possible because Islam talks about justice based on which Ahmed makes an atypical but accurate claim: Jameela’s agency to fight for justice is directly linked to her religious beliefs.

A general view of the Muslim dominated Juhapura area is pictured in Ahmedabad. Credit: Reuters/Ahmad Masood/Files

Jameela actively uses piety in two ways – firstly, as a personal and societal means of moral (re)awakening and secondly, to justify her fight for justice among Muslims by aiding the women victims of 2002 riots and through ‘intervene in local incidents of marital violence against women’.

In past, I have argued, based on my dissertation fieldwork conducted in 2017 on two Islamic activist organisations – JIH and Gujarat Sarvajanik Welfare Trust (GSWT) – in Ahmedabad that Muslims now direct their collective energies towards ‘building skills and capacity’ of the community through schools where secular syllabus co-exists with Islamic education. This is the puzzle of Muslims in Ahmedabad, whom the state has failed to take care of, that Ahmed’s work also stresses upon: the discovery of Islam in a post-riot Ahmedabad has not hindered their socio-economic mobility but actually facilitated it through faith-based organisations (FBOs).

The nationwide rise of Hindutva has necessitated Islamic activists to moderate their emphasis on duties and instead focus on a discourse of rights to develop platforms for communal harmony with secular groups, I had argued. Ahmed in her article supplements this assertion underscoring that, lately, JIH has initiated programmes of inter-faith dialogues with Dalit and Christian groups.

What is it that makes such programmes possible? Perhaps, Islamic activists like Jameela skilfully exploit upon the Indian variant of sui generis secularism, where religion is not reduced to the private sphere, to be faithful and secular at the same time. Ahmed does not explore this point which has major implications for our understanding of secularism – a task that she, perhaps deliberately, leaves to future political theorists using her astute anthropological insights.

Being queer in Ahmedabad

This year, on February 18, QueerAbad, a safe space for Ahmedabad’s LGBTQIA+ community, hosted the city’s first ever pride parade attracting more than 300 people.

The parade was a historical moment for a city often derided in the liberal circles as a conformist, orthodox, and ‘non-happening’ place: In some sense, Ahmedabad unbolted its relatively closed cultural environment through this initiative. Writing in Seminar, Shamini Kothari, co-founder of QueerAbad, insists that the parade made it possible to think that ‘Queer Ahmedabad was no longer an oxymoron’.

QueerAbad celebrating its second year anniversary in August 2018. Credit: Facebook

Her article is a story of Ahmedabad’s LGBTQIA+ community as much as it is her personal narrative. Kothari tells that her non-conformist sexual identity has complicated her bonding with her hometown, Ahmedabad. She tries to imagine that queerness has always existed in the city’s streets, in its now much-celebrated heritage, and in its everyday life. Just that no one bothered to see Ahmedabad through that inventive lens. Perhaps, the much-needed recent reading down of section 377 of Indian Penal Code (IPC) – a colonial vestige of backward Victorian morality – by the Supreme Court, may make sexual minorities more visible in Indian cities.

Kothari’s platform, QueerAbad attempts to dispel misconceptions about the LGBTQIA+ community by regularly holding ‘Ask What You Will’ session where the group takes anonymous questions. At the pride parade, which was a culmination of a two-day conference on issues of queer community, she informs, QueerAbad ‘handed out booklets in Gujarati on the ABCs of LGBTQIA+’ and explained their event to ‘curious onlookers’.

Also read: ‘Heritage City’ Ahmedabad Was Built Through Violence and ExclusionShe showcases remarkable awareness of access restrictions that events such as a pride parade face – the crowd that attended the parade comprised mostly of an entitled group of upper-class, English-educated folk. Before QueerAbad began and Kothari came in contact with several other queer residents of Ahmedabad, she hardly knew about well-known cruising spots of Ahmedabad representing a world of queers outside Grindr (a dating application for LGBTQIA+). This ignorance is possibly due to her own privileged background, she recognises while posing an important question: Why is there no historical memory of the LGBTQIA+ community in Ahmedabad?

It’s a city, a home for her, where the experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community, she reasons, does not have an archive.

Counter-cultural thrust

This issue on Ahmedabad by mostly first-time women contributors to the Seminar belonging to a younger generation of researchers appears as if in an unplanned conversation with Saroop Dhruv’s Shahernama, a book by an erudite woman academic cum activist that I reviewed in the first two parts of this review series. Most write-ups deal with the contemporary themes and still emergent trends fulfilling several interpretative deficiencies of Shahernama about the present-day Ahmedabad.

Though a few commentaries suffer from the academic syndrome of ambiguous writing with unwarranted insertion of obfuscating jargons, the exhaustive list of topics covered in the issue – the city’s cultural fabric, its violence, its poets, its food culture, its queer movement, usage of religiosity by women to resist marginalisation, conservation practices in the city inter alia – takes to a task what Siganporia calls ‘the deeply entrenched masculinist epistemes of mercantile capitalism’ of Ahmedabad. This illustrative counter-cultural thrust of these writings makes them indispensable to the scholar of the city.

The author expresses gratitude to Tridip Suhrud for providing the initial push to write this review. The author’s fieldwork contained in his study titled ‘Faithful and Secular: Islamic Activists in Juhapura, Ahmedabad’ was supported by the Baillie Gifford Research Grant.

Sharik Laliwala, 22, an alumnus of King’s College London and Ahmedabad University, is an independent researcher on Gujarat’s politics and history based in Ahmedabad. He is on Twitter @sharik19.