'We Have No Orders to Save You'; State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat (2002)

Indian government officials have acknowledged that since February 27, 2002, more than 850 people have
been killed in communal violence in the state of Gujarat, most of them Muslims. Unofficial estimates put the
death toll as high as 2,000.  At this writing, murders are continuing, with violence spreading to rural areas fanned
by ongoing hate campaigns and economic boycotts against Muslims.  The attacks against Muslims in Gujarat
have been actively supported by state government officials and by the police.
The violence in Gujarat began after a Muslim mob in the town of Godhra attacked and set fire to two
carriages of a train carrying Hindu activists.  Fifty-eight people were killed, many of them women and children.  
The activists were returning from Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, where they supported a campaign led by the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, VHP) to construct a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of a
sixteenth century mosque destroyed by Hindu militants in 1992. The Ayodhya campaign continues to raise the
spectre of further violence in the country—Hindu-Muslim violence following the destruction of the mosque
claimed thousands of lives in the city of Bombay and elsewhere in 1992 and 1993. The VHP claims that the
mosque was built on a site that was the birthplace of Ram.