Gujarat: Four Years After

By now the mainstream media has moved on from the pogroms of 2002, wedded as it is to narratives of "normality" punctuated by "communal violence." This narrative is simply incapable, as an intellectual matter, of engaging with a situation where violence is the norm. Indeed, in order to sustain itself this narrative needs to think of violence only in terms of bloodshed or assault, looting or arson: when violence does not involve the spilling of blood or hordes of battered faces on TV, but is instead a question of systematic exclusion, a stigmatization so pervasive that it seems natural, the "mainstream" finds it almost impossibly difficult to come to grips with it.

All of which makes it all the more important that we bear in mind those, like Himal and Prashant Jha, who continue to ask the questions that need to be asked.