title: Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy
author: Siddharth Varadarajan
description: Siddharth Varadarajan is deputy chief of the national bureau of the <i>Times of India</i>. He has reported on several important political events, from Kashmir and the royal palace massacre in Nepal, to Pakistan, the weapons-inspection crisis in Iraq, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Before his current assignment, he was an editorial writer for the same newspaper. <br><br> Among his academic writings are the articles 'The Ink Link: Media, Communalism and the Evasion of Politics,' in K.N. Panikkar, <i>The Concerned Indian's Guide to Communalism</i> (Viking 1999), and 'The International Dynamics of a Nuclear India,' in D.R. Sardesai and Raju G.C. Thomas, Nuclear India in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2002). He studied at the London School of Economics and Columbia University and taught economics at New York University before turning to journalism in 1995.
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  Praise for the book
  
  
  
  
  
  ‘Outbursts of communal violence in India are often portrayed as aberrations,
  as moments of collective madness interrupting a lively liberal democracy.
  Nobody can maintain that position after having read Ward Berenschot’s
  meticulously researched and robustly argued study of local politics and
  violence in Gujarat. Berenschot demonstrates that organizing, preparing and
  imagining communal violence—real or potential—is endemic to the way democracy,
  identity and political power function at the level of neighbourhoods and
  streets in India’s economic powerhouse. A must read for anyone interested in
  the political sociology of violence.’
  
  
  —Thomas Blom Hansen,  
  
  
  Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
  
  
  ‘The 2002 genocidal violence in Gujarat has remained partly unexplained.
  Focusing on the city of Ahmedabad, Ward Berenschot’s book throws new light on
  these events, drawing on unique fie