Gujarat: The Making of a tragedy Edited by Siddharth Varadarajan Penguin Price: Rs 295 Pages: 460

Memories of the Gujarat carnage are still disturbing. But no longer because they are just painful. Now also because, nine months later, they raise questions that cannot be easily answered. Was it genocide or is that an exaggeration based on a biased perception? Has the state deliberately chosen to ignore the 150 bjp/vhp/Bajrang Dal members against whom firs have been lodged or are those reports false and malafide? Did the chief minister order the state police force to overlook the reaction to Godhra or are accounts that he did so fictitious?

And what about the eyewitness reports of ministers and MLAs leading mobs, attacking Muslims, assaulting women? Isn't that proof enough? If not, what sort of proof do we need? In fact, what sort of proof is possible?

As I read this book, days after reading the "Concerned Citizens Tribunal Inquiry Report", the questions repeated themselves. Can I be sure? Do I want to accept? Do I want to believe? There is a part of each of us, rational, liberal and intensely human, that cannot immediately accept something so horrible, so cold-blooded, so calculating and murderous could have been done deliberately, with such meticulous planning and deathly precision. If I myself couldn't, you argue, no one else could.

Haunting fires: The post-Godhra carnage

But the voice of reason can speak differently as well. Hitler didn't look like a monster. Germany voted for him and at one point it even loved him. And no one-neither then nor now-has found a document, an order, a piece of paper that proves he was responsible for the Holocaust. Yet no one doubts it. Why? Because such orders are not given in writing, they are not recorded, not transcribed for history. Just the opposite.

Then why do we look for Narendra Modi's guilt in writing? It cannot be found in pen and ink. It will not be found in government archives. It doesn't lie in carefully preserved records. It has to be inferred, construed, reconstructed.

And why should that be so surprising or so difficult to accept? After all, that is how criminals are often caught. Only the careless or the stupid leave behind tell-tale signs of guilt. The clever are usually caught circumstantially. So, I suspect, will be the case this time too.

Siddharth Varadarajan's book is the clever man's guide through the maze of facts, theories and arguments that surround what happened in Gujarat in February and March 2002. He and his fellow writers do not answer all your questions but they take you closer to answering them for yourselves. However, their efforts serve another purpose as well. They provide a chronicle and an independent archive of facts. Should you forget or become confused, should your memory falter or be questioned, this book puts together all that we know, all that we have surmised and all that we have assumed about the carnage in Gujarat.

At the end, however, the questions remain. But can they ever be answered satisfactorily? Is that a mistaken quest? Perhaps only the wilfully blind look for irrefutable proof when the farsighted accept and understand more readily. Or is that bias? I suppose each one of us will answer for himself. I already have.

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