Page 24 Human Rights Defender • Volume 25 • Issue 1 • April 2016 On our way to Chamanpura, a working class locality in Ahmedabad, Farooq bhai suggested that we pick up Imiaz. It was well past lunch ime, but he insisted that we visit Gulbarg Society before heading to Teen Darwaja to eat kabab and halwa. Farooq had been driving me around the city since the morning. I’d got to know him a few days back when I arrived in Ahmedabad – having hired his auto-rickshaw at the railway staion. On the way to the place where I was staying, I told him why I was in the city – to look for public remnants of the 2002 ani-Muslim pogrom for a research project on collecive memories of mass violence. I felt embarrassingly voyeurisic to say this even as I wanted to befriend Farooq, but his relaxed disposiion had ofered an invitaion that allowed me to rest the inhibiions of a irst meeing. He very forthcomingly agreed to show me around a few days later. It was winter – someime around late-November in 2014 – but the Ahmedabad sun was scorching hot. I was hungry, sweaty, angry and deeply shaken by the visits to some of the key locaions in the city which experienced massacres of Muslims by mobs mobilized by neo-fascist Hindu militant groups – with acive state support – during the pogrom in which close to 2000 people (mostly Muslims) died, and tens of thousands were internally displaced. These locaions were pointed out to me by Farooq, because 12 years later, they carried no visible scars on the city’s gaudy body. Many of these locaions were mosques and Sui dargahs of great historical signiicance that were completely razed to the ground and paved over. Fancy cars drove over these well-tarred smooth roads now – a metaphor that has come to symbolize Gujarat’s projecion of itself as India’s most economically advanced state. The warts – of what remained of those Muslims who survived the pogrom – were preserved as cruel reminders on the cartographic and cerebral margins of the city. These were the squalid ghetoes into which Muslims displaced by violence were forced to live. Legislaion, by designaing certain locaions in the city as ‘disturbed areas’, has played a central role in the making and maintenance of these ghetos by not allowing its Muslim inhabitants to sell their property to move elsewhere in the city. 1 In other words, the law is meant to segregate Muslims from the rest of the city. Built with support from Muslims from across India, one of these ghetoes – ironically called Ciizen Nagar – was where a lot of survivors have been resetled. The whole area didn’t have roads, sanitaion, or hospitals. It was located right beside the place where the sewage and garbage of the The silence of Gulbarg: Some inadequate images Oishik Sircar