When vegetarianism becomes a cause for shedding human blood

In July, one of my former B. Tech students from IIT Delhi who is now a Facebook friend asked me to “like” Narendra Modi. I was taken aback at first and carefully steered my cursor away from his virtual request, lest I “like it” by mistake.

A few days later, I met the same student at a coffee shop in Lajpat Nagar. We were supposed to meet to discuss his plans for post-graduate study, and he was also interested to know more about my research. We discussed those things as we drank coffee and looked out of the window at the Metro construction lining the road beneath us.

Then it started pouring outside and neither of us had an umbrella. I knew we’d be sitting for some time and so ventured to ask him about his support for Modi.

I knew that many, if not most, students at IIT were Modi supporters, not to mention much of middle-class Delhi, including members of my own extended family. A second cousin of mine in her late 20s had recently posted an article on Facebook suggesting that if Congress backed the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, why should the BJP, and specifically Modi, not be considered electable after the Muslim pogrom of 2002?

My former IIT student explained it to me like this: “He (Modi) is charismatic; I’m fascinated by him,” he said, as his face brightened and his eyes began to shine. And then, with a more sheepish grin, he added, “There is no better option.” He had supported the Aam Aadmi party early on, but told me he switched to the BJP since he felt they were more electable. But he also told me he liked the BJP’s “policies.” What mattered was “change” and “progress” and not being an underdog on the global economic stage. Gujarat in 2002 mattered only in so far as any other regrettable event mattered.

What struck me most about my student and my cousin — both of whom I respect for their seriousness and intelligence — was their fatigue with hearing about Gujarat 2002; to them it was a recorder playing the same, increasingly irrelevant message.

A few weeks later, I picked up a copy of the anthropologist Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi’s ethnography, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India, and wondered how a book published in 2012, speaking about events in 2002, might have any relevance today. The book is notable not for the re-iteration of facts, which are not disputed, or gruesome accounts, which are not recounted in any detail, but for its careful, dispassionate rendering of the matter-of-factness of the violence, the attitudes underpinning the violence, and the acceptance and complicity with the events afterwards.

Ghassem-Fachandi was there during the four days of carnage. He walked the streets, crossed the bridges, and talked to onlookers gathered at teashops, around police posts, or watching things burn. He writes of the festival-like atmosphere as even he is asked by someone witnessing the burning of Muslim shops and places of worship to take part. He writes: “I felt embarrassed and somewhat ashamed, standing amidst people attacking a Muslim structure of worship. Rajan wanted me to throw stones too, but I simply turned around and left, I did not know what to do. I did not know what to say. I had unself-consciously hesitated for a small instance, caught between wanting to please his unexpected call to participate, and my resistance to it.”

Ghassem-Fachandi also writes about people close to him; he had two Hindu roommates who were supportive of the violent events against the Muslim community of Ahmedabad.

Their psychological disposition toward Muslims and their own selves is strangely connected. His roommate, Bharat, knows Parvis is of Muslim background because of his name, but he also sees Parvis as a foreigner since he is from Berlin with a German mother and an Iranian father; he is ultimately outside of Bharat’s immediate social schema. We learn that Bharat had been encouraged to live with Parvis by a mentor at the college where he teaches precisely because Parvis was thought to be a Muslim and Bharat wanted to test himself, to confront his own prejudices. In time, we see that what drives Bharat the most is his own upward caste mobility and anxiety, expressed partly through his semi-secret membership in the RSS, proving to himself and others that he is not just aspiring but achieving, going ahead.

After the pogrom, Parvis meets his Gujarati teacher and friend, Sejal, in a restaurant.

Sejal attempts to explain what happened to Muslims. “They are very honest,” she says, “hardworking people,” “sober,” but, “They are not like us, they do this butchering business.” The theme of vegetarianism and what it means in Gujarat and for the modern Hindu identity is a recurrent one. Meat-eating has a sense of moral degradation and is also seen as “proof” that Muslims in particular “lack vulnerability” and need to be taught a lesson. Sejal explains: “They do not see what is right, what is wrong. They see blood. If they can kill animals without a thought, how can they have problems killing humans?” In a perverse way, Ghassem-Fachandi argues, a moral sense of superiority for not committing violence against animals becomes a justification for committing violence against Muslims.

Throughout, Ghassem-Fachandi is trying to understand how “neighbours turn into stereotypes”, and the book shows just how these attitudes, fears, and paranoias get built up over time — through Partition memories and fantasies of lost women, the partitioning of urban spaces, films like Gadar, what politicians say, and the everyday culture of how people see groups different from themselves. It is, in fact, in these times, the peaceful, normal times, when we must take note of what we say and think, as well as who we choose to lead us.

The author is assistant professor of anthropology at George Mason University