This is the land that has seen the confluence of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Islam for centuries. This is the land where Hindu kings built mosques and where Muslims still follow many Hindu traditions. This is the land of the author of the haunting Vaishnava Janato ... and of that inspiring apostle of ahimsa and tireless crusader for communal harmony whom we call Father of the Nation.

This is also the land of boundless entrepreneurial energy, a state that is among India's most urbanised and industrialised. This is India's fourth richest state, which clocked Chinese-style economic growth rates in the 1990s. Yet something is very profoundly disturbing about Gujarat. The communalisation of Gujarati society pre-dates the BJP's rise as a political force in 1990. In the 1980s, even somebody as distinguished as Ghulam Sheikh, the painter who was even married to a Hindu, could not obtain a professorial appointment in Vadodara's MS University in spite of its vice-chancellor Bhikhu Parikh championing his case. But the 1990s have been worse. Pravin Togadia, educated and a cancer surgeon to boot but a Hindu version of Mullah Omar, represents a widely prevalent obscurantist mindset as does the suave and slick Narenda Modi, now exposed as the cheerleader of genocidal goons. How do you explain this Gujarati cocktail of heady economic growth and sharp social retrogression?

Could it be due to the burdens of history? After all the historic Somnath temple ravaged by Mahmud Ghazni almost a thousand years ago and reconstructed in 1950 is located in the state. M.A. Jinnah himself hailed from Gujarat. A number of the erstwhile princely states, mini-states and feudatories in the region that eventually became Gujarat had to be forced into the Indian Union by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Junagadh being a prime example.

Second, have the traumatic September 1969 Ahmedabad riots grievously damaged the Gujarati psyche, both Hindu and Muslim? Ahmedabad had witnessed communal clashes earlier in 1941 and 1946 but 1969 was a bloodbath, taking place ironically in the birth centenary year of Sabarmati's saint. Over 600 lives were lost in the holocaust spread over four to five days. Gujarat's subsequent history has been one of religious clashes that have not spared even cities with a history of peace like Surat.

Third, has Muslim disenchantment and frustration, exploited by mischief-makers from outside, fuelled Hindu revivalism? Nine per cent of Gujarat's population is Muslim. Yet, in a Vidhan Sabha of 182, there are but four Muslim MLAs. Even at the peak of social engineering-the kham alliance between Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims which gave the Congress huge majorities in 1980 and 1985-the number of Muslim MLAs was seven. In states like Kerala, Karnataka, West Bengal and even Uttar Pradesh, Muslim representation in politics is substantial and not as marginal as it is in Gujarat.

Fourth, what social impact has the decline in the textile industry and the "casualisation" of the labour force had? In Ahmedabad alone, about one lakh workers, 20,000 of them Muslims, have been retrenched in the past two decades. A large number work in the vastly lower wage informal sector, other avenues of employment being closed to them. This is a readymade pool of the disaffected and the frustrated. The underworld has been able to spread its tentacles as well because of the counterproductive prohibition policy that is in force.

Fifth, how has the decline of civic institutions, of which Gujarat has a rich tradition, impacted on communal harmony? This is a thesis that has been analysed in scholarly detail in a very recent book, Ashutosh Varshney's Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life. The noted Indian-American academic at the University of Michigan looks at three pairs of cities, Calicut and Aligarh, Hyderabad and Lucknow and Ahmedabad and Surat to understand communal violence and the wellsprings of communal harmony. His conclusion: the decline of the Congress as a civic force and of trade unions and labour movements in Ahmedabad specially has adversely affected communal amity.

Finally, could there be something in the nature of Gujarati urban capitalism in the 1970s and thereafter that engenders social chaos? Economic growth has created sharp regional disparities within the state and its human development indicators like infant mortality do not do it proud. Has a new, rugged class, different from the high-minded Sarabhais and the Lalbhais, taken over, a class that eminent journalist-academic Harish Khare has called "lumpen capitalists"? Along these lines, is religious fervour at home, both Hindu and Muslim, also being fuelled by long-distance nationalism, by the globalisation of the Gujarati middle class-at least one-third of the Indians in the UK and US have Gujarati origins.

At this benumbing moment of darkness and despair, of shock and shame, this Indian's immediate catharsis can only take the form of such troubling questions.