Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013

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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Violent morphologies: Landscape, border and scale in Ahmedabad conflict

Ipsita Chatterjee
Department of Geography and Environment, University of Texas at Austin, GRG 334 1 University Station A3100, Austin, TX 78712, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Conflicts produce violence through death, confinement, torture, and control of spaces of everyday life.
Received 2 June 2008 This paper investigates how spatial morphologies, like landscapes, borders and scales, are re-ordered
Received in revised form 14 August 2009 and re-imagined to materialize violence. A Hindu–Muslim conflict in the globalizing city of Ahmedabad,
India in 2002 is used as a case study. The conflict unfolded in a dying industrial city, now being re-envi-
sioned through neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism into a ‘global city’. During and after the riots, the
Keywords: majority Hindu community, and the local Hindu fundamentalist government, annihilated the life spaces
Violence
of the minority Muslim community. Through a combination of Hindu rioting and urban renewal, land-
Urban conflict
Landscape
scapes were destroyed, new spaces produced, borders re-imagined, and new ones imprinted on the land-
Scale scape, to segregate previously co-existing communities. Local government and Hindu ideologues
Border creatively juxtaposed neoliberal economic polices, global discourses of Islamophobia, local ethnocen-
India trism to alter the spatial morphologies of Ahmedabad. Justice entails the democratization of space by
altering the violent morphologies of Ahmedabad.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction, or putting space in its place 2. Approaching conflict

Space has been the pre-occupation of geographers. Ratzel con-
ceptualized space through an organismic analogy – space as
lebensraum. Mackinder argued that mastery of the world would
require control over strategic spaces (Agnew and Corbridge,
1995). Space allows for realization of the material conditions of
daily life embodying territory, resource, livelihood and identity.
This has been clearly understood in intellectual and policy circles:
control over existence means commanding space. War, conflicts,
and riots are interpreted as control over people, but also as control
over spaces. Radical spatial theorists, too, see war, conflicts and
riots causing violence not only through death, confinement and
torture, but also through control, command and, more impor-
tantly, the re-ordering of the spaces of everyday life. Justice en-
tails reclaiming and democratizing such spaces. This paper aims
at producing a radical spatial understanding of inter-community
conflict. Using the case study of Hindu–Muslim conflict in a glob-
alizing urban space, Ahmedabad city, India, the paper elucidates
how urban space is commanded, controlled, and re-ordered to
materialize violence. The paper argues that: just as agents of
exclusion use space to implement violence, agents of justice must
alter violent spaces to bring about the democratization of every-
day reality.
E-mail address: chatterjee@austin.utexas.edu
In this context, existing theoretical approaches to conflict can
be broadly divided into: (a) those not explicitly engaging with
space in their analysis of conflict (Ahmed, 2002; Brass, 2003; Bre-
man, 2002; Engineer, 2004; Kaviraj, 1997; Sarkar, 2002); (b) those
using space in their analysis, but understanding it only as proxim-
ity, location, stage or setting for violent events (Barber, 2000;
Chua, 2004; Friedman,1999; Huntington, 2000); (c) those
attempting an explicitly spatial analysis – here space is not just
location or setting for violent events, but space is seen as being
used, produced, reproduced and destroyed to inflict violence.
Such analyses explicate how the everyday spaces of existence
(homes, neighborhoods, and boundaries) or symbolic spaces (reli-
gious sites) are destroyed or re-constructed to inflict oppression
(Bacchetta 2000; Brenbeck and Pollock, 1996; Falah, 2003; Gra-
ham, 2004a, 2004b; Gregory, 2004; Gregory and Pred, 2006;
Mahadevia, 2002; Ossman and Terrio, 2006; Oza, 2006; Secor,
2006; Varshney, 2002).
The first approach is not spatially explicit. It focuses instead on
historical, social, economic, political, and cultural processes, or
combinations of these, but the imbrication of space with process
is not investigated. Ahmed (2002), Breman (2002), Sarkar (2002),
and Engineer (2004) provide moving narratives of inter-commu-
nity conflict, where religious fundamentalism becomes a political
ideology, with riots systematically encouraged by the political
party in power to eradicate religious minorities. Violence is largely
understood as a political process, where history and culture are

0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.08.005
1004 I. Chatterjee / Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013
distorted to fan religious fanaticism. Breman (2002) adds an eco-
nomic perspective by explicating how processes like industrial
restructuring and unemployment produce increased inter-commu-
nity competition. Political and economic processes thus combine to
structure violent realities. The use of spatial strategies to material-
ize death, destruction, usurpation and injustice is not investigated.
The second approach analyzes geopolitics, conflicts and riots as
‘wars of the world’, where nations, communities, identities, and
their geo-historical, geo-cultural, geo-economic locations are
important in theorizing conflict, but the role of space is reduced to
background or stage, as with location and proximity. Thus, the
‘West’ is divided by a ‘‘fault-line” from the ‘Rest’ (Huntington
2000) with the two blocs eternally engaged in conflict, because
‘West’ is envisioned as a geo-cultural location alien and separate
from the ‘Rest’. Friedman (1999) and Barber (2000) allude to loca-
tions within and outside global free market capitalism through met-
aphors like ‘Lexus and the Olive Tree’ and ‘MacWorld versus Jihad’,
with socio-economic and cultural differences between these geo-
economic divisions understood as sites for conflict. Chua (2004)
analyzes colonial geographies of divide and rule, induced migra-
tions, and socio-geographic locations of market-dominant minori-
ties as important factors contributing to conflict. Geographic
locations like countries, continents, geographic metaphors, and geo-
graphic processes are important components of such analyses. But
this approach does not explicate how everyday spaces are actively
commanded, controlled and re-ordered to produce violent realities.
The third approach understands conflict by investigating the
violent geographies actively produced through control and re-
ordering the spaces of everyday life. The production of space and
spatial imaginations are investigated as ingredients for injustice
and violence. For Gregory (2004, p. 183), ‘‘imaginative geogra-
phies” are ‘‘performed” on space to ‘‘locate”, ‘‘oppose”, and ‘‘cast-
out” the ‘other’ in mind and body. Graham (2004a, 38, 2004b,
198) argues that cities no longer provide a ‘‘backdrop” for violence;
rather, buildings, assets, industries are the actual ‘‘targets”, while
‘‘asymmetric urbicide” involves denying the enemy the right to
everyday city life. Bacchetta (2000), Falah (2003), Secor (2006),
Mahadevia (2002), and Varshney (2002), in their respective analy-
sis of violence, focus more on life spaces and their reordering,
rather than the role played by spatial imaginations in ‘othering’.
For Falah (2003), the violent realities of Palestinian existence can
be understood through the projection of ‘‘enclaves” of Jewish set-
tlement into the occupied territories in an attempt at expanding
and dismembering the contiguity of Palestinian settlements.
Mahadevia (2002) understands violence as the shrinking of the
‘‘life spaces” of Muslims through urban renewal and rioting.
Varshney (2002) attributes resurgence of inter-ethnic violence to
the shrinking of communal spaces of interaction like factories,
unions, and clubs. Bacchetta (2000) and Brenbeck and Pollock
(1996) emphasizes the symbolic importance of sacred spaces,
and indicate how history and archaeology may be manipulated
to identify, and even produce, iconic spaces – possessing and
reclaiming symbolic spaces becomes a violent project of erasure
of communities delegitimized as having no right to the sacred.
Secor (2006, 40), looking at Turkey and the PKK (a militant Kurdish
group), refers to ‘‘zones of exception” where the law is turned in-
side out through various mixes of law and lawlessness.
I situate my analysis of the 2002 riots in Ahmedabad, India
within this third approach. My paper adds to this approach concep-
tually and empirically by fleshing-out three distinct morphologies
– landscape, border, and scale – through which violence is pro-
duced. By using examples from Ahmedabad city, India, this paper
indicates how apparently random acts of bombing, burning, bull-
dozing, and bordering are systematic spatial strategies through
which violence is inflicted.
3. Placing space in India’s Hindu–Muslim conflict
India has experienced a tumultuous history of ethnic conflict,
and there exists a body of literature on Hindu–Muslim conflict
that attempts to make sense of the violence. This literature is lar-
gely positioned within the first of the three approaches discussed
above. With the exception of Mahadevia (2002), and to a limited
extent Varshney (2002), the existing literature does not attempt a
spatially-explicit analysis of violence, but instead intricately
examines political–economic, historical–cultural processes. These
processes are seen as unfolding temporally, the re-ordering of
space is not investigated. Understanding violence without imbri-
cating space can be problematic, because such narratives tell us
why violence occurred, but not how it happened. Vanaik (2001)
and Horowitz (2001) trace the decline of political secularism,
and the corresponding rise of the Hindu right, attributing violence
in post-independence India to political imperatives that pitch
religious groups against each other. Kaviraj (1997) and Ray-
chaudhuri (2000) provide a dense cultural history of the Hindu
right, tracing its ideological origins to Hitler and cultural nation-
alism, indicating how sense of racial purity and pollution are im-
bued in the ‘modern’ politics of ethnic hatred. Indeed, the
rejuvenation of the Hindu right is no doubt the most significant
causal factor structuring violent incidents in different parts of In-
dia. However, ideological imperatives, like Hindu fundamental-
ism, are materialized through spatial strategies (bombing,
burning, and re-bordering). Just as Hindu–Muslim violence in
the wake of Indian independence was materialized by the spatial
partitioning of India from the newly created state of Pakistan, vio-
lence within contemporary India is materialized through the pro-
duction of new spatial morphologies (walls, borders, bulldozed
homes, and burnt establishments). Policies acquire body and
depth through this kind of spatial realization. Vanaik (2001) and
Horowitz’s (2001) ignore this spatiality. Nussbaum (2007), on
the other hand, in an analysis of Hindu–Muslim riots in 2002, re-
veals how diasporic communities, especially Hindus in the United
States, funded the riot machinery. Repatriated funds are referred
to as the ‘‘saffron dollar” (Kamat and Matthew, 2003, p. 12) since
the color of saffron is considered auspicious by Hindu rightwing
ideologues. For Nussbaum, globalization does not promote secu-
larization but equips parochialism by feeding on ethnocentric
nostalgia of diasporic communities. Dollars from diasporic Hindus
in the US map-out specific topographies of inequality depending
on where they flow-in and how they get ‘fixed’ in space through
‘global’ chains of Hindu temples that mark new territories of
appropriation. Neither Nussbaum (2007), nor Kamat and Mathew
(2003), discuss the spatial implications of foreign direct invest-
ment in the business of violence. Ahmed (2002), Sarkar (2002),
and Engineer (2004) discuss the 2002 Hindu–Muslim riots in
Ahmedabad city located in the state of Gujarat, describing the
systemic imperatives that produced the riots, they argue that vio-
lence was not spontaneous, but rather, engineered meticulously;
they provide a comprehensive first-hand account of Muslim dis-
placement and violation. These accounts, drawing from field re-
ports, describe burnt bodies and destroyed homes. Yet the
spatial implications of burning, bulldozing, and displacing in the
production of ‘new’ micro geographies of alienation are not
addressed.
Within this largely a-spatial discussion of Hindu–Muslim con-
flict, Mahadevia’s (2002) work is an exception. Mahadevia men-
tions the shrinking ‘life spaces’ of the urban poor due to
entrepreneurial urban renewal policies, which uproot and displace,
intensifying inter-community struggles in Ahmedabad city.
Through a study of Hindu–Muslim conflict in six cities in India,
Varshney (2002) concludes that formal associational contacts are
 I. Chatterjee / Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013
crucial factors in maintaining inter-community peace in urban
spaces. Varshney’s theory of inter-ethnic peace, promoted through
civic institutions, alludes to the importance of public spaces like
the factories and labor union associations in promoting inter-eth-
nic interactions. However, Varshney’s analysis does not explicitly
indicate how the erosion of such spaces can promote violence,
nor how such sites can serve as democratic spaces for promoting
inter-community harmony. How spaces shrink, and what implica-
tions shrunk spaces may have on inter-community life, what new
morphologies are produced to inflict violence, how such morphol-
ogies inflict violence, and how violent morphologies can be re-
versed are questions that require in-depth investigation of the
spatiality of violence.
In this paper, I add to the existing body of literature on Hindu–
Muslim conflict by attempting an explicitly spatial analysis of vio-
lence. I indicate how economic, cultural, and political processes of
injustice are materialized through the production of violent
spatial morphologies. More specifically, I argue, that landscapes,
borders, and scales are spatial morphologies commanded and
controlled by economic and cultural processes to produce vio-
lence. Economic processes like the neoliberalization of Ahmeda-
bad city and associated industrial restructuring and urban
renewal, combine with politico-cultural processes of Islamopho-
bia to generate violent morphologies. Landscaping, bordering,
and scaling are violent morphologies set in motion by economic
and cultural ideologies and put into effect through policies that
determine the spatiality of violence in Ahmedabad – space and
process are imbricated. The conclusion argues that the democra-
tization of life requires democratization of space by challenging
violent morphologies.
4. Violent geography of Ahmedabad city
In 2002, a Hindu–Muslim riot erupted in Ahmedabad city, in the
northwestern state of Gujarat, India. The Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), with a Hindu fundamentalist agenda, organized the riots
against the minority Muslim community (Chenoy and Shukla,
2002). The BJP relies on a politics of cultural nationalism to stigma-
tize religious minorities, particularly the Muslims (as they are the
largest minority group). The Muslims are labeled as foreigners who
should be forcibly ‘Hinduized’ to prove their ‘Indian-ness’. After
September 11, and the subsequent Islamophobia, the BJP at-
tempted to juxtapose its sub-national discourse of anti-Muslim
xenophobia with a global discourse of the ‘evil terrorists’ to gain
US support (Shah, 2002; Balgopal, 2002).
The riot was spurred by an incident in the nearby city of Godhra.
Two coaches of the Sabarmati express train caught fire and 58 pas-
sengers, mainly women and children perished. Some of these pas-
sengers were supporters of the BJP. Soon rumors were started
implicating the Muslim community with the Godhra incident
(Ahmed, 2002). As the rumors spread, a Hindu–Muslim riot started
in Ahmedabad, that continued for two and a half months. According
to official estimates, members of the Hindu community killed 1180
Muslims, while un-official estimates find that perhaps 5000 Mus-
lims were killed. Muslim women were raped, Muslim property
was looted and burnt, with active and tacit support from the police
and the state BJP government (Yagnik and Seth, 2002).The riot dis-
placed approximately 100,000 Muslims from their homes, often
forcing them to resettle in peripheral areas of the city. The economic,
cultural, and built landscape was substantively altered (Yagnik and
Seth, 2002). Overnight, Hindu temples and roads were built over de-
stroyed Muslim shrines (Ahmed, 2002; Sarkar, 2002).
Ahmedabad was once referred to as the ‘‘Manchester of India”
(Breman, 2002), because of a large concentration of cotton textile
mills in the eastern part of the city. East Ahmedabad is inhabited
1005
by a poor industrial labor force comprising of ‘low caste’1 Hindus
and Muslims. East Ahmedabad is separated from the west by the riv-
er Sabarmati – the western city being inhabited predominantly by
the middle and the upper middle class Hindus (Mahadevia, 2002).
The city has experienced industrial decline since the Indian economy
was opened to neoliberal policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The New Economic Policy ushering in neoliberal reforms removed
protectionism, quotas, and import restrictions, and rendered the
Ahmedabad mills vulnerable to open-market competition. Eighty
mills have closed since the mid-1980s. As a result 100,000 workers
lost their jobs, and were pushed into the informal sectors competing
for low-paid casual work like hawking and vending, with incomes
35–45% below what they had been (Breman, 2002; Kundu, 2000;
Mahadevia, 2002). Urban poverty has also simultaneously increased
(Kundu, 2000). Urban development plans have been neoliberalized –
moving away from redistributive policies, like slum up-gradation or
public housing, to beautification projects, like the Green Partnership
Program, Riverfront Development Program, and coercive slum clear-
ance to ‘dress up’ the city for foreign investors (Mahadevia, 2002).
Chatterjee (2004, p.141) indicates that in the era of economic liber-
alization the ‘‘imagined morphology” of Indian cities is increasingly
bourgeois, where the unsightly squatters must be eradicated to at-
tract global investment. In the past, mill workers from both commu-
nities shared life spaces, interacting in the textile mills, in the labor
union associations, and sharing cups of tea in the same cafeterias.
With the closure of the mills, the common spaces of interaction dis-
appeared, increasing the level of insulation between the two com-
munities. Muslims, being poor and ethnic ‘others’, have been
doubly marginalized because they suffer from economic and cultural
marginalization (Rudolph and Rudolph, 1987). In the 2002 riots, the
worst violence happened in east Ahmedabad, home to the informal-
ized poor from both communities.
India is characterized by a long history of cultural pluralism,
where groups have distinct identities, but share public spaces
and ‘‘form a part of an extended and dynamic network” called soci-
ety (Das, 2006, p. 33). Blocks, lanes within neighborhoods, some-
times whole neighborhoods, are homogenous in ethnic terms.
Yet such homogeneity does not result from institutionalized segre-
gation, but represents group affinity in the settling process. Hindu–
Muslim relations have been contentious due to the legacies of
partition and creation of Pakistan as an Islamic state. Most histori-
ans trace this inter-community contention to colonial divide and
rule strategies (Appadurai, 1973; Brass, 2003; Corbridge and
Harriss 2000; Kaviraj 1997; Pandey, 2006). Hindu–Muslim conflict
in post-independence India is largely an urban phenomenon, con-
centrated in specific cities at specific times. Ahmedabad city had a
peaceful history in the pre-independence period, violence becom-
ing common only in the 1980s and 1990s (Varshney, 2002), and
the 2002 conflict is a landmark event because of its intensity.
5. Spatial morphologies – landscape, border, and scale
In this section, I attempt to conceptualize landscape, border,
and scale, indicating how economic, political, and cultural pro-
cesses work with spatial morphologies to inflict violence. With re-
spect to landscape, Mitchell (2003, p. 789) states that there is an
imminent need to systematize a tool kit for understanding the
‘‘constant destruction of landscape,” which will provide ideas for
1
The traditional Hindu social order is considered to be hierarchical where
individuals are born into castes which initially represented their family occupation.
The Brahmins or the priestly class occupy the top rung, followed by the erstwhile
ruling class of kings and landlords, followed by the merchants and traders and lastly
by the lower castes who carried out menial jobs like agriculture, pottery, weaving and
a whole section of outcastes who performed ‘polluting professions’ like burning the
dead.
1006 I. Chatterjee / Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013
the ‘‘production of a more just. . .landscape”. Following Mitchell, I
argue that there is a need not only to understand ‘‘constant
destruction” but to empirically substantiate how destruction cre-
ates spaces for new rounds of landscape reproduction. Violence is
materialized not only through destruction (bombing and burning)
of the existing edifice, but also through the reproduction of new
landscapes in the post-destruction period. Violent landscapes help
justify more violence. Gregory (2004, p. 184) indicates how within
days of the attack on the Twin Towers, Israeli attacks on the West
Bank were intensified using September 11 as a justification – ‘‘an
absolute conjunction of ‘world terrorism’ in which Bin Laden and
Arafat are interchangeable entities”. Landscapes are palimpsest of
realization and negation – realization of identity, ideology, politics,
and also simultaneously, a negation of identities, ideologies, and
politics of the ‘illegitimate’ (Nieto and Franze, 1997). It is important
to emphasize the ‘land’ in landscape – the material and the phys-
ical forms. Edifices of modern development, like skyscrapers, wide
roads, planted trees, shopping malls, and highways are unevenly
concentrated in certain parts of cities, thus defining the profiles
of un-even development in socio-economic terms at the urban
scale (Smith, 1982). Such unevenness, I argue (and later illustrate)
becomes more acute under the neoliberal policy regime because of
its drive towards aestheticizing certain spaces to fit global imagi-
nations of a ‘Mega city’.2
In terms of borders, a large section of the globalization literature
focuses on the increased porosity, permeability, and even evapora-
tion of territorial/non-territorial borders, and hence the prolifera-
tion of ‘spaces of flows’ and ‘network societies (Cheglowski, 2000;
Castells, 2001). Newman (2006) emphasizes the new strategies of
border-strengthening, as with the US–Mexico border, or the Is-
rael–Palestine in the wake of 9/11. Border-strengthening policies,
henceforth referred to as (re)bordering are spatial morphologies
that produce exaggerated perspectives of ‘insiders and outsiders’
(Brace et al., 2006). Through changing degrees of porosity and
impermeability, borders alter spatial reality that can be oppressive
or emancipatory depending on the context of their deployment.
Borders are also manifested through segmentation and the entrap-
ment of labor (England, 1993; Hanson and Pratt, 1995; Pratt, 1989;
Peck, 1996). Entrapment of women, racial/religious minorities, and
poor people in informal activities coincides with the spatial entrap-
ment/segregation of these same groups, creating a world of ethnic
neighborhoods and working class colonies. Economic barriers, like
labor market boundaries between white–collar–blue collar jobs,
or formal–informal work, often overlap with cultural differentiates
(Bauder, 2001, p. 46) to co-create residential segregation, sealing off
the ‘under-privileged’, often in ethno-racial cul-de-sacs of working
class quarters.
The concept of scaling has received a lot of attention in the con-
text of Neoliberalism and Post-Fordist globalization (Brenner 1999;
Harvey, 1995, 1996, 2000; Herod, 2001; Escobar, 2001 Feather-
stone, 2003; 2005; Ashman, 2004). Post-Fordism is seen as allow-
ing for reduced importance of the national scale (Uitermark, 2002)
and an increasing capability of cities to transcend the national
scale to become ‘global cities’ (Sassen, 2002) – a process that Smith
(2000) describes as ‘scale-jumping’, and Swyngedow (1997) calls
‘glocalization’. Up-scaling under Post-Fordism is empowering for
political–institutional entities that can jump-scales vertically
(Swyngedouw, 2004; Uitermark, 2002). For instance, up-scaling
2
It is important to note that projects like the ‘Mega City’ symbolize contemporary
urban renewal policies that involve reproducing cities in the light of world-class cities
like London, New York, Tokyo through greening, cleaning, road-widening, slum
eviction. Neoliberal reforms and penetration of foreign direct investment at the city
level provide impetus for this entrepreneurial urbanism where the city should be
‘dressed’ to attract foreign investment. The dressing up thus requiring removal and
rehabilitation of the poor to oblivion. Third World literature (Kundu and Mahadevia,
2003) often refers to this process as elitist urbanism.
of the city is empowering for a local government adopting global
policies like neoliberal urban renewal and then using its up-scaled
status to draw funds from national and global players. Such up-
scaling can sometimes be disempowering for labor and social
movements that are more spatially entrapped. The spatially en-
trapped actors however, can become empowered if the labor or so-
cial movements can manage to up-scale by acquiring global clout
through dense networking with other similar actors (Bosco,
2006). Scaling, therefore, represents re-ordering, where globaliza-
tion can actualize the violence of entrapment, or produce democra-
tization, depending on who commands the morphologies of
vertical-reach and/or horizontal span – size and level are often
conflated in the scale literature (Marston et al., 2005).
6. Investigating violent morphologies in Ahmedabad
I carried out fieldwork in 2006 to investigate how space had
been reordered and re-imagined through violent morphologies in
the Ahmedabad conflict. I interviewed 65 Muslims in their homes.
Thirty-five interviews were carried out in the old textile mill local-
ities of east Ahmedabad, in different neighborhoods namely: Gom-
tipur, Raikhand, Jamalpur, Kalupur, Jhuapura, and Bapunagar.
Thirty Muslims were interviewed in Jhuapura and Siddiquabad in
the south western peripheries of West Ahmedabad, which are
new, all-Muslim neighborhoods emerging after the riots, populated
by displaced Muslims from all over the city. The mill localities were
chosen in order to investigate processes of informalization and la-
bor entrapment. The colonies in the west were chosen as represent-
ing ethno-spatial segregation following the riots. I also interviewed
35 Hindus (fewer Hindus were willing to speak). About 20 of them
were in the same neighborhoods as the Muslim interviews in east
Ahmedabad, while the rest 15 were in the neighborhoods of Paldi,
Gupta Nagar, Gokul Dham in the west. Each interview was carried
out in a separate household. The interviews were semi-structured
and conducted on the basis of snowball sampling. The semi-struc-
tured interviews attempted to unearth the spatiality of violence
in Ahmedabad: the spatial strategies adopted by Hindus and Mus-
lims in the conflict, either to inflict violence, or to escape from it, the
spatial strategies adopted by the government in implementing
development projects, and how urban morphology was trans-
formed between pre-riot and the post-riot periods.
The initiating contact for the Muslims in East Ahmedabad was
provided by a Muslim auto-rickshaw driver,3 whose vehicle served
also as transport during my interviewing process. The initiating con-
tact for Muslims in the western part of the city was provided by the
director of a local NGO in West Ahmedabad. The initiating contact
for the Hindu interviewees was provided by local Hindu shop keep-
ers. The names of all Hindu and Muslim interviewees have been
changed to preserve their anonymity and safety (except in the case
of public officials). I interviewed the chairperson of the Gujarat Sar-
vajanik Relief Committee (GSRC), a coalition of well-off Muslim busi-
nessmen who assisted in the relief and rehabilitation of the riot
victims. I also interviewed 12 government officials, namely: the
mayor, deputy mayor, district collector (chief bureaucratic officer),
commissioner, and deputy commissioner of Ahmedabad Municipal
Corporation (AMC), the chief executive authority, the ex-chief exec-
utive authority and three other members of the Ahmedabad Urban
Development Authority (AUDA), a district development officer, and
the head of the slum clearance board.
In tracing the violent morphology of the city, I also maintained a
field journal to record the number of: (1) destroyed homes; (2)
3
An auto- rickshaw is a cheap mode of local transport available for hire on hailing;
it is a three-wheeler like a rickshaw but has an engine, runs on gas and is smaller and
more open than a car.
 I. Chatterjee / Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013
destroyed establishments; (3) mosques destroyed, rebuilt, or re-
placed, and the nature of the replacement. This was done from:
(a) field observation of the visible remains of destroyed buildings
and visible indications of reconstruction, (b) supplementary infor-
mation from local inhabitants and members of relief committees,
and (c) records published by Human Rights groups. The following
three sections indicate how spatial morphologies like landscape,
border and scale have produced violence in 2002 and thereafter.
7. Landscape morphology in the Ahmedabad violence
The riot in Ahmedabad entailed significant destruction of the
landscape. Zohra of the Muslim community in Siddiquabad sum-
marized this violent reality:
After a year and a half had elapsed, we finally mustered the
courage to return to Gulbarg society, where we originally
lived. This is the same complex where Dr. Jafri, former Mem-
ber of Parliament, was hacked to pieces alive, before being
burnt in front of his family. When we went there, we were
threatened by our erstwhile Hindu neighbors, all our belong-
ings were gone, and our home had been partially burnt. We
received no relief from the local government. A Hindu family
now occupies whatever remains of our house. Gulbarg soci-
ety is now empty of its Muslim inhabitants. They told us that
Muslims don’t belong here; they don’t belong to Ahmeda-
bad, or India.
A few months prior to the riots, groups of people had gone
around the Muslim neighborhoods and housing complexes con-
ducting an un-official census of the inhabitants (Ahmed, 2002; Sar-
kar, 2002). Most interviewees believed that the collected
information was later used to locate Muslim houses and establish-
ments during the riots. On the main road in Paldi, a mixed neigh-
borhood in West Ahmedabad, the charred remains of a shop lay
pitifully sandwiched between two other shops that were un-
touched. The two shops on either side of the destroyed remains be-
long to Hindu businessmen, as was apparent from the prominent
display of Hindu Gods on the signboards of the shops. The shops
owned by the Hindus were carefully preserved. Interviewees
claimed that the one in between, belonging to a Muslim, was ran-
sacked and then set on fire – cooking gas cylinders and bulldozers
were predominant means used to enforce destruction.
Table 1, summarizes my inventory of landscape destruction in
and around Ahmedabad. This inventory is based on interviews car-
ried out with members of the GSRC and from field observations.
The AMC has made no attempt at preparing an official estimate.
Unofficial estimates are piecemeal reports put together by NGOs,
Human Rights groups, and a Fact Finding Commission. As such, it
is nearly impossible for an individual investigation to provide an
accurate picture by avoiding double counting, and ensuring full
inclusion. In Table 1, I tried to provide a sample of the extent of
destruction; it represents a small fraction of the total damage.
GSRC members, helping me compile the data informed me about
the neighborhoods, or parts of neighborhoods for which they had
no recorded information; I filled in these gaps through field work.
Information for parts of Gomtipur, and the whole of Bapunagar,
Shahpur and Ram–Rahim Tekra were compiled through field
observation (burned sites still lying vacant, unused, or covered in
rubbles, even after four years had elapsed), and on the basis of
information provided by local residents.
Zafarbhai from the Muslim community in Bapunagar says:
They needed to burn our houses and shops to eliminate us
completely. The rioters came in truckloads of thousands,
intoxicated and brandishing hammers, knives, gas cylinders,
chanting names of Hindu Gods. The rioters are invariably the
1007
schedule caste Hindus4 belonging to the muscle wing of the
BJP, i.e. Bajrang Dal. We could not lock our doors, and hid in
panic. Some of our Hindu well-wishers gave us shelter for a
few days. We could not reclaim our property, Hindu neighbors
have taken over, and so we moved to Siddiquabad, which
houses the displaced Muslim population – it was set up by
an Islamic relief trust. The problem is, in Siddiquabad, we just
have a home, no school for the kids, no job, no business net-
work. I am now unemployed for a year.
As Zafarbhai indicates, homes and shops must be burnt to annihi-
late a community completely; landscape destruction erases exis-
tence and prolongs violence by causing displacement and socio-
economic disruption. Landscape destruction is a systematic strategy
deployed by the ‘‘youth-muscle wing” (Bajrang Dal) of the BJP, the
Bajrang Dal consisting mainly of the ‘lower caste’ Hindus who
worked as the foot soldiers during the riots. The Durga Vahini is
the women’s wing of the Bajrang Dal, and together they draw ideo-
logical nourishment from the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP, ideology
wing of the BJP), which consists of higher caste Hindus, mainly
Brahmins and Baniyas (priestly and business caste). The Rashtriya
Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu fundamentalist self-help orga-
nization of volunteers representing the cultural affiliate of the polit-
ical party, the BJP (Oza, 2006; Raychaudhuri, 2000) idolizes Hitler’s
model of cultural nationalism (Appadurai, 1973; Raychaudhuri,
2000; Ahmed, 2002; George, 2007). The BJP and the RSS together
deployed the foot soldiers to concretize their ideology of Hinduiza-
tion using landscape destruction as a strategy to violate and annihi-
late. Rubina Khan of the Muslim community, who runs an NGO, says
that the decline of the manufacturing sector, mainly the textile
mills in the late 1980s, together with an associated rise in unem-
ployment and frustration among the poor and the youth, is respon-
sible for the vibrancy of the muscle wings of these fascistic
organizations. She also identifies mechanisms and strategies de-
ployed to destroy landscapes:
The unemployed working class youth, who are also ‘low-
caste’ Hindus, are frustrated by the lack of formal employ-
ment. Their fathers are now unemployed due to the closure
of the textile mills. The ideology wing successfully uses this
pent-up frustration by identifying ‘low caste’ Hindu youths,
and making them presidents of the local branch of the mus-
cle wing, giving them a salary of 500 rupees a month ($11.1
approximately).5 The presidents then identify other youths to
form a local club; these clubs become the foot soldiers to exe-
cute acts like: burning Muslim homes, identifying and
destroying Muslim shops and property, desecrating mosques.
During the riots, bulldozers were brought in to destroy mos-
ques right in front of the police stations! How can a spontane-
ous act of violence be so well equipped? Because it is not
spontaneous! Years of organization building, and manipula-
tion of the social psyche go into acts of destruction. Later,
the higher echelons just dismiss these destructive acts, by say-
ing that higher caste Hindus had nothing to do with it. The
uncultured lower castes masterminded it!
About twenty mosques were destroyed in Ahmedabad. In many
cases, makeshift Hindu temples were built overnight to reclaim
the freshly ‘liberated’ spaces. Often, the AMC quickly replaced the
destroyed structures with paved roads to officially erase hundreds
4
The census of India classifies certain castes as having historically suffered socio-
economic discrimination due to their historically accorded low position in the Hindu
caste hierarchy. These traditionally ‘low’ caste groups referred to as the scheduled
castes have been accorded special status (reservation of seats in government schools,
jobs).
5
One dollar has been taken to be equivalent to forty five rupees.
1008 I. Chatterjee / Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013

Table 1 gardens, and traffic islands that would also be used for advertising;
Inventory of Muslim shops and houses destroyed in Ahmedabad city and outskirts. the goal was to produce a city that was prettier and more environ-
Neighborhood Houses Shops mentally friendly. The AMC budgeted 15 million rupees ($333,
destroyed/burnt destroyed/ burnt 333) in 1997–98, and 10 million rupees ($222, 222) for each of
Gomtipur 262 98 the next four years. The AMC now owns 66 gardens, 45 parks
Bapunagar 90 8 and 64 traffic islands (Dutta, 2000). The US Agency for Interna-
Gyatrinagar 99 – tional Development (USAID) was a major player assisting the
Urbannagar 60 7
Rakhyal 91 13
AMC in carrying out an environmental impact assessment and pro-
Kuha 32 – viding guidelines for the project. The USAID’s vested interest in the
Haldar vaas 44 16 GPP can be understood in terms of its mission statement:
Bahrampura 29 –
Dudheswar 75 – The lack of basic urban environmental infrastructure in most
Shahpur 97 –
Ramol 19 12
cities in the developing world channels a torrent of
Kujad 11 – untreated sewage and waste into rivers, lakes, and coastal
Sundaramnagar 71 – zones, damaging ecosystems and threatening the productiv-
Saraspur 250 21 ity and safety of water bodies. These problems are most
Nanachiloda 12 –
intense in the cities where they originate, but they also jeop-
Prem darwaza 24 –
Vatva 30 – ardize US interests in a number of different ways. Urban
Virat nagar 9 – environmental problems undermine sustainable economic
Ram-Rahim Tekra 9 – expansion. Unstable economies can lead to a rising tide of
Chamanpura 66 24 economic refugees. Increasingly unlivable cities are more sus-
Gujribazar 17 –
Kokhara 62 38
ceptible to social unrest and political instability. Robust new
Naroda 67 – strains of ‘‘exotic” diseases that first appeared in the over-
Kapad vang 62 – crowded slums of poorly-managed cities overseas are show-
Halol 90 – ing up with increasing frequency in US communities,
Saraspur outskirts 356 45
inadvertently imported by visitors, returning travelers, or
Azadnaga and Sundaramnagar 308 6
outskirts the swelling numbers of environmental refugees abandon-
ing their increasingly unlivable cities. Humanitarian con-
Total 2342 288
cerns and the need to protect US citizens motivate this
Source: Interview of Gujarat Sarvajanik Relief Committee (GSRC) members, and country’s keen interest in helping other nations improve
field observation.
their management of urban growth and environmental con-
ditions (Hales, 2003, emphases mine).
of years of culture (Human Rights Watch, 2002). Some 230 historic
sites, under the supervision of the Archaeological Survey of India, USAID’s creation of green landscapes in Ahmedabad is an at-
were destroyed (Harding, 2002). Not only was the violence actual- tempt to realize ‘‘US interests” of ‘‘sustainable economic expan-
ized through destruction, but the new landscapes in the form of sion,” curtailing ‘‘economic refugees”, stabilizing susceptibility to
makeshift temples or roads represent a new template of extended ‘‘social and political instability”, controlling ‘‘exotic diseases and
violence on an already erased community. Table 2 provides a small protecting US citizens”. For the AMC, in partnership with USAID,
window into the general picture of mosque destruction encoun- it is an opportunity to clean and dress-up the city to create a con-
tered in the field area. ducive environment for foreign direct investment with increased
Interviewees often feigned ignorance and claimed: ‘‘There is no contact with US aid agencies to improve prospects for future
communal divide in Ahmedabad, you outsiders over-emphasize investment. Mahadevia and Brar (2006) indicate how the realiza-
minor skirmishes of the past” (Chaman of Paldi from the Hindu tion of a green landscape occurs on an uneven plane. East Ahmeda-
community), but destroyed and reproduced landscapes bear testi- bad, which houses the poor working-class Muslims and ‘low-caste’
mony to what really happened. The 2002 violence could not have Hindus is severely lacking in green open spaces and parks. How-
been realized by burning bodies and raping women alone. Burnt ever, field observations reveal that all the greening, cleaning, and
bodies soon disappear, and rape victims continue to be Muslims. beautifying has been concentrated in West Ahmedabad, which
Landscapes on the other hand materialize destruction and repro- houses the middle and upper-class Hindu community. Large
duction. Destruction and reproduction remain inscribed in spaces amounts of investment have been pumped into greening already
of annihilation (negation) for the minority community, and spaces green and posh localities of Law Gardens and Parimal Gardens in
of nostalgia (realization) for the majority community. West Ahmedabad.
A parallel strategy of spatial realization and negation has been Programs like the GPP now receive central government funding
adopted by the AMC under neoliberal urban renewal schemes. under national urban renewal project called the Jawaharlal Nehru
The Green Partnership Program (GPP) started in 1997–98 through National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). Beginning in 2005–
a public–private partnership to green the city by developing parks, 2006 the mission includes an outlay of approximately $11 billion.
Sixty-three cities, including Ahmedabad, have been chosen for

Table 2
Inventory of mosques destroyed.

Name of mosque Rebuilt Nature of the replaced structure Rebuilt/Replaced by

Mae Fatehpur Darga No No –
Paldi Bhatka No Road Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC)
Kattari Pir Saras Yes – Local Muslims
500 year old Isanpur Masjid (Archaeological Survey of India site) No – –

Source: Field observation.

 I. Chatterjee / Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013
investments through JNNURM. The dominant vision is the grand
idea of the ‘Mega City’, modeled after world class cities like New
York, Tokyo, and Sydney (Jhabvala, 2006). A prominent aspect of
the project involves dressing up the city by removing eyesores like
slums and beautifying through greening and cleaning (Combat
Law, 2004). Neoliberal urban renewal represents a move towards
urban entrepreneurialism, where a ruthless quest for profit re-
duces development imaginaries to aestheticization.
Global players like the USAID and national projects like the
JNNURM are interested in ‘up-grading’ spaces so that they are prof-
itable for corporate expansion. The AMC is interested in realizing
green landscapes for the ‘Mega City’. For the ‘low-caste’ Hindu poor
of East Ahmedabad however, the green landscapes are landscapes
of negation. The green landscapes represent the ‘misplaced’ prior-
ities of an indifferent government – priorities that could have been
directed towards employment generation. For the Muslim poor of
east Ahmedabad, these beautiful landscapes symbolize the nega-
tion of a community that has not been able to realize their de-
stroyed homes and mosques. Muslim interviewees claimed that
they received no compensation for rebuilding their lives after the
2002 riots. The green landscapes of neoliberalization are repro-
duced spaces that are similar to the temples and roads built over
desecrated mosques, because they too symbolize negation through
landscape reproduction. The green landscapes actualize violence
by neglecting a hurt minority and prioritizing the world of pleasure
of a class and ethnic majority.
8. Border morphologies in the Ahmedabad violence
The river Sabarmati dividing Ahmedabad, has functioned as a
natural border for several decades (Breman, 2002). Earlier, it
served to segment the city into classes (Mahadevia, 2002), East
Ahmedabad housing predominantly the ‘low-caste’ Hindus and
the Muslims, who formed the industrial working class, and West
Ahmedabad housing the middle and upper class, who are predom-
inantly upper caste Hindus. Over the years, this class segregation
has become more entrenched, as some upper-caste Hindus who
have the means, but have been living in their ancestral homes in
East Ahmedabad, have now migrated to the west. All 20 Hindus I
interviewed in East Ahmedabad were ‘low-caste’, poor Hindus.
The east represents a predominantly working-class sub-culture
living in densely packed quarters. The ‘Hindu lanes’ lie along side
‘Muslim lanes’, their apartments often sharing a common wall,
but facing in opposite directions. This residential pattern is not un-
ique to Ahmedabad, in a country where religion is an important
determinate of social life – low-income neighborhoods often have
predominantly ethnically homogenous lanes, but stand close-to
‘other’ lanes, sharing spaces like playgrounds, markets, restaurants,
theatres, labor union associations, and workspaces (Das, 2006). The
working-class quarters in East Ahmedabad surround vacant ruins
of once prosperous mills. Tall Minars (beautifully carved columns),
and ornate gates, representing the glorious days of Islamic archi-
tecture, stand in disarray. The west represents the global city with
multiplexes, hotels, educational institutes, fashion designing insti-
tutes, and international banks. The government buildings, tradi-
tionally located in the east, are slowly moving to the west. The
peripheries of the west are quickly becoming settled by the nou-
veaux riche (Mahadevia, 2002). ‘‘Gated colonies’ have cropped-up
in the western periphery, surrounded by glossy malls and gigantic
Hindu temples.
The river used to be an amorphous boundary – the working-
class Hindus and Muslims lived mainly in the east to be close to
the mills where they worked (Mahadevia, 2002), however, it was
not impossible for a Muslim with means to purchase a home in
the west. The neighborhood of Paldi, which stands as an entry
1009
point to West Ahmedabad, still has a few Muslim shops. Usmanpu-
ra, a neighborhood in deeper West Ahmedabad has a Muslim
name, although currently there are no Muslim households there.
Paldi and Usmanpura are spatial testimonies of the fact that Mus-
lims once lived in co-habitation with Hindus in the western city. In
the contemporary globalizing era the river is a more concrete bor-
der, with the east signifying spatial entrapment. The poor Hindus
of East Ahmedabad can no longer afford homes in the west, which
has experienced a rise in real estate prices due to the packaging
and selling of West Ahmedabad as a ‘global’ city suitable for inves-
tors (Mahadevia and Brar, 2006). Upper middle-class Muslim busi-
nessmen, who have the means to buy property in the west, have
been denied, under various pretexts, the right to buy and register
properties there. Builders in West Ahmedabad have often hung no-
tices in their building complexes stating that no Muslims will be
allowed to buy homes in order to assure their Hindu middleclass
clients. Zafar, a Muslim businessman in East Ahmedabad says:
West Ahmedabad is rich Ahmedabad, it is clean and green –
skyscrapers and malls stand proudly, the poor Hindus can
not afford to live there. I can afford to live there, but no
one will sell me land or an apartment there, because I am
a Muslim. The builders have hung notices to keep the Mus-
lim-buyers out.
The ‘low-caste’ Hindus and poor Muslims who lived in the eastern
ghettoes used to share a common working-class subculture, sharing
common spaces of association and leisure. Since the closure of the
mills, this class cohesion has disintegrated. Unemployment and ra-
pid informalization produced, within a span of twenty years, a new
generation of ‘individuals’ from what used to be a class sharing a
common economic position (Breman, 2002; Kundu 2000; Mahade-
via, 2002). Among the 55 interviewees from east Ahmedabad, 41
respondents worked in the informal sector. Mohammad, from the
Muslim community in East Ahmedabad says:
I remember a time when all our fathers worked in the mills,
both Hindus and Muslims of east Ahemedabad worked
together, ate in the same cafeterias, went to the same labor
unions, but look at our generation, the mill jobs are gone, we
now compete with each other in hawking, vending, and auto
rickshaw driving trying to earn at least one decent meal a
day.
In the absence of shared spaces of social interaction, class con-
sciousness has given way to place-specific, particular identities
based in religion. The 2002 riot was therefore played out predom-
inantly in the east, with the BJP drawing its Bajrang Dal foot sol-
diers from the unemployed ‘low-caste’ Hindus, providing them
with money and alcohol (Ganesh and Mody, 2002). Border mor-
phologies were subsequently deployed by the Hindu and Muslim
communities. In the Hindu lanes and blocks in the east, iron gates
have been erected at the open end facing the Muslim lanes. The
common streets that separate the Hindu blocks from the Muslim
blocks are referred to as ‘borders’. There is nothing visible – no
signs, or fences to indicate that borders exist. When I asked a resi-
dent if he could show me the local border, he said ‘‘You are stand-
ing on it”. The common streets crisscrossing working class
neighborhoods have been ‘‘re-imagined” as borders, innocent thor-
oughfares are now razor-sharp morphologies. During times of ten-
sion, the streets act as battle grounds, with Hindus mounting
florescent lights to keep the Muslims away. Any Muslim straying
on the ‘border’ during a locally tense moment would be subjected
to attack by stones, knives and guns. Akhil bhai of Gomtipur from
the Hindu community states:
1010 I. Chatterjee / Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013
The gates are necessary for security; the Muslims have to be
kept out. You have no idea how dangerous they are. They
have connections with international terrorist organizations
like the Al Qaeda and Laskar-e-Toiba. The border is a good
thing; they know that if they cross it, they have to face the
consequences.
For Akhil Bhai therefore, there is an ‘absolute conjunction’ of terror-
ism where the Ahmedabad Muslim must be an Al Qaeda terrorist –
the local ‘other’ is easily juxtaposed with the global ‘other’ in
Islamophobic bordering strategies.
Many Muslims fled their homes in the east after the 2002 riots
and settled in Jhuapura, in the south-western periphery of Ahmeda-
bad. Jhuapura is an all-Muslim neighborhood housing all classes,
ranging from very poor casual workers, to domestic helpers, to mid-
dle-class shopkeepers; owing to its all-Muslim status, it is referred to
as ‘Mini-Pakistan’. With each successive period of strife, fresh waves
of displaced Muslims find a place in Jhuapura – Muslims must have
re-bordered spaces like Juapura to preserve their existence. Rubina
Khan, a resident of Jhuapura says that the place is normalized as a
‘‘negative zone”. It is impossible to get phone connections and other
utilities, without active attempts by the local providers to delay the
procedure and harass the applicants. Jhuapura is separated from the
adjoining Hindu neighborhood of Gokul Dham by a large vacant field
that forms a ‘zone of transition’ between two polar worlds.
Siddiquabad, another all-Muslim settlement in western Ahmeda-
bad houses 180 families displaced after the 2002 riots. This colony,
built by the GSRC, is located in the periphery of the city surrounded
by vacant plots of land on all four sides. Siddiquabad is another case
of a (re)bordering strategy, deployed by the victims of the 2002 vio-
lence. The only difference with Jhuapura is that Muslim families do
not want to live here. Siddiquabad is far from the real city. It faces
water scarcity, has no school, nor employment opportunities. Laila
from the Muslim community in Siddiquabad clarifies this:
We were vendors, selling vegetables, used clothes, and toys
in the busy streets of East Ahmedabad – now we live outside
the city, we can’t afford the daily commuting cost, and there
is no prospect of employment here, everybody is poor.
The residents of Siddiquabad have (re)bordered as a colony of vic-
tims of the 2002 violence. Their entrapment reflects a desperation
strategy of hapless people having no other option. Hindus on the
other hand, fear that spaces like Siddiquabad and Jhuapura are
‘‘negative zones” for breeding and recruiting terrorists.
Another poignant case of bordering is operationalized through
residential segregation achieved by the Economically Weaker Sec-
tion (EWS) housing project. EWS houses are allotted by AUDA
through lottery to individuals displaced by a contemporary urban
renewal project, with incomes equal to, or below, Rs. 2000
(approximately $44) per month. I visited all eight EWS colonies, lo-
cated in the peripheries of West Ahmedabad, together consisting of
4500 homes. I visited the offices of the superintendents in each col-
ony, surveyed the registers containing the names of the residents,
and spoke to some of the residents. My aim was to investigate
whether individuals of the Muslim community, who are being dis-
placed by neoliberal urban renewal, are being resettled in the EWS
housing scheme.
A survey of eight colonies, having 4500 homes, showed a com-
plete absence of Muslims. All the housing units have been allotted
to ‘low-caste’ Hindus. The official explanation was that Muslims
never submitted an application or, since the houses are allotted
by lottery, there can be no guarantee of representation from all
communities. In some cases the superintendents claimed that at
least one house was allotted to a Muslim family. When asked for
the house number, the information became suddenly unavailable.
A survey of the common name plates under each building, and con-
versation with the residents, revealed that no Muslim has ever
been allotted a EWS house (Hindus and Muslims have clearly dis-
tinguishable names in India).
Although, both the Muslims and the ‘low-caste’ Hindus are being
affected by the neoliberal urban renewal processes, only the former
are selectively excluded through spatial strategies of (re)bordering
like the EWS housing scheme. AUDA consists of authorities hand-
picked by the elected representatives of the BJP, who are institution-
ally segregating Hindus in EWS houses. The Muslims are left to fend
for themselves, and seek refuge with GSRC, and other NGOs. Muslims
fear that the EWS colonies are sites where the civil militia is concen-
trated for mobilizing riots whenever required. Once drawn, or re-
imagined, the borders continue to exaggerate and dehumanize the
socially distant outsider as ‘‘terrorist”, or ‘‘civil militia” and re-pro-
duce conditions for future violence.
9. Scale morphology in Ahmedabad violence
At a cursory glance, the Ahmedabad conflict may appear as an in-
tensely local event where fanatical local actors are trying to maintain
ethno-religious uniqueness. But, in-depth investigation reveals that
the AMC and the AUDA are not just naval-gazing local actors inter-
ested in maintaining the purity of Hinduism. Indeed these actors
are actively up-scaling (Uitermark, 2002) through neoliberal urban
renewal strategies that allow them to collaborate with global actors
like USAID, international investment houses, and the JNNURM pack-
ages. The spatial strategies deployed by the now glocal (Swyngedow,
1997) actors like the AMC and AUDA are no longer simply represen-
tatives of local discourses – GPP is an attempt to selectively green the
city in accordance with global discourses of what an ‘environmen-
tally–friendly’ Third World city should look like in order to attract
investment. Replacing mosques destroyed in the riots with paved
roads is not simply a demonstration of local religious xenophobia,
but simultaneously compliments global imaginations of Islamopho-
bia and global stereotypes of the Muslim terrorist. The vision of the
‘Mega City’ includes a reproduction of Ahmedabad in the mirror im-
age of world-class cities. A global discourse of ‘‘Islamic terrorism” is
now actively used by the AMC to justify its passivity in punishing the
Hindu mob that wreaked destruction. In the context of globalization,
‘local’ actors have up-scaled their political discourses and economic
policies to produce new morphologies of ‘development’ and destruc-
tion, which are violently oppressive for the poor in general, and the
Muslim poor in particular.
The urban poor, including both ‘low caste’ Hindus and Muslims
have, fewer options for up-scaling/glocalizing, and are increasingly
entrapped through informalization, spatial segregation, and cul-
tural discrimination. The Hindu poor upscale to a certain extent
by connecting their local anti-Muslim xenophobia with a more glo-
bal discourse of Islamic terrorism. The Muslim poor, on the other
hand, have fewer opportunities for up-scaling. Unlike neoliberal
capital, which is mobile, the urban poor of Ahmedabad are
‘place-sticky’, and have little knowledge of the internet or the com-
puter that might enable them to up-scale through call center jobs.
Ahmedabad is a site of violent contradiction between those who
can up-scale, and those who are entrapped. Globalization produces
uneven scalar morphologies with place sticky actors enabled in
some places but entrapped in others. In the case of Ahmedabad,
the Muslim poor have fewer opportunities to up-scale than the
more dominant groups, their eagerness to interview with me rep-
resents their desire to use every opportunity to up-scale their nar-
ratives so that they are rendered accessible to a more global
audience. Greater global out-reach of certain actors through up-
scaling can magnify the existing tropes of violence, or produce
entirely new ones by altering the life worlds of those actors who
cannot immediately up-scale.
 I. Chatterjee / Geoforum 40 (2009) 1003–1013
10. Conclusion: a more democratic space
Economic policies of neoliberal industrial restructuring and ur-
ban renewal, and politico-cultural processes like religious funda-
mentalism and Islamophobia, structure the violent realities of
Ahmedabad. This reality is materialized by reordering the mor-
phologies of everyday life through landscaping, bordering and scal-
ing. Landscapes are destroyed to annihilate material existence.
New, unjust landscapes are erected to extend the hurt and vio-
lence. Segregation and entrapment are produced by re-imagining
borders. Injustice is produced by landscape destruction/reproduc-
tion and bordering-segregation. These gather strength through
scaling strategies adapted by actors with greater global reach to
intimidate those who are more spatially fixed. The reality of the
violence and injustice of Ahmedabad cannot be completely com-
prehended by simply investigating the ideological and political
orientation of the BJP (Vanaik, 2001; Horowitz, 2001), or by
explicating the genealogical roots of BJP’s cultural fanaticism
(Kaviraj, 1997; Raychaudhuri, 2000), or by attributing contempo-
rary violence to increasing participation of diasporic communities
(Nussbaum, 2007). Such analyses provide important entry points
towards understanding why violence is set in motion. But in order
to comprehend how violence is materialized, how injustice and
alienation acquires longevity, and what can be done to address vio-
lent realities, it is important to adapt a spatial analysis that inves-
tigates how unjust economic and cultural processes produce
violent morphologies. Investigating the violent morphologies of
Ahmedabad – how mosques were destroyed and replaced, how
green landscapes by-pass the poor, how Muslim homes were selec-
tively erased, how borders divide neighborhoods that were previ-
ously integrated, how the glocal government makes public
housing inaccessible to Muslims – provide a more comprehensive
narrative of violence. Mahadevia (2002) is correct in her prediction
that the ‘life spaces’ of the poor are shrinking. But in order to
understand how that shrinkage is realized, a spatial analysis of vio-
lent morphologies is required.
‘‘Efforts for a better reality cannot simply come through meet-
ings of reconciliation and Truth Commissions, there can be no pro-
gressive change unless there is justice”, says Rubina Khan of the
Muslim community. Justice can only be brought by democratizing
violent morphologies so that unjust landscapes, exclusionary bor-
ders, unfair segregations are erased, and replaced by more demo-
cratic spaces. Varshney’s (2002) theory of two broad kinds of
societies: (a) societies like India where groups have lived an in-
ter-mixed civic life; and (b) societies like the US, having a history
of predominantly segregated civic existence are useful. Varshney
argues that, in the former, inter-ethnic peace is promoted through
civic institutions. He provides an example from Northern Ireland
conflict, where peaceful localities possessed sites of inter-commu-
nity interaction like, Rotary, cricket, soccer, and bowling clubs. In
societies like India, micro spaces within neighborhoods, and
sometimes whole neighborhoods, are homogenous in ethnic
terms, but such homogeneity is not representative of institution-
alized processes of segregation, nor does such homogeneity pre-
clude the sharing of common spaces (Das, 2006) like roads,
markets, restaurants, schools, playgrounds, places of work, and
trade unions. Such sites are examples of democratic spaces of
interaction which help maintain the ‘unity’ of the diverse society.
Extreme incidents like the 2002 violence reorders these spaces, al-
ters control over existing spaces, replaces democratic imagina-
tions with xenophobic perceptions, which then institutionalize
difference and segregation.
Democratizing violent morphologies would require a ‘‘politics of
hope” that attempts to change the ‘‘sense of reality” where compas-
sion can thrive (Thrift, 2006, p. 287). Democratization assumes that
1011
compassion is not dead, but has been suspended as a political strat-
egy to amass power through violent geographies. Violent morphol-
ogies are not libratory, even for the dominant group, they do not
promise long term sustenance for a desperate society. The 2002 vio-
lence is a short-term strategy deployed by the BJP to deflect the
attention of the Hindu poor from the government’s own impotency
towards improving living conditions in the context of economic lib-
eralization. Soon, other strategies will become imminent, and when
there is no ‘other’ left to destroy, when there are no remaining
spaces to reorder, violence will self-destruct (Arendt, 2004).
In an attempt to democratize violent spaces, some NGOs have
been conducting censuses of homes, shops, and burned mosques.
Political parties in the state, other than the BJP, must use these cen-
suses to pressure the BJP at the state level to reinstate riot-ravaged
landscapes and provide legal and financial protection to riot vic-
tims interested in returning to their homes in the mixed neighbor-
hoods of east Ahmedabad. National and international delegations
and fact finding commissions have visited Ahmedabad (Chenoy
and Shukla, 2002). These delegations must push the local govern-
ment to remove re-produced landscapes, like paved roads and
make-shift temples, to investigate evidence of discrimination
regarding non-supply of utilities to all-Muslim ghettoes, to inte-
grate through new bus routes the post-riot all-Muslim colonies
that have cropped-up outside the city, and to investigate discrim-
ination in the allotment of EWS housing. The urban poor of Ahme-
dabad are famous for their cottage industry – embroidery, tie and
dye textile, and mirror-work handicrafts, which were institution-
ally nurtured until recently. The self Employed Women’s Associa-
tion (SEWA.org) in Gujarat is a thriving co-operative of labor,
artisans, dairy farmers, micro credit institutions, benefiting from
the state government – SEWA has assisted local communities in
times of natural disasters like earthquakes (SEWA Bharti, 2001).
Playing a proactive role in including within artisan cooperatives
Muslim women from riot-affected families who are adept in stitch-
ing, toy making is not an impossible goal, and can provide long
lasting relief. Academics, NGOs, delegates, secular political parties,
and the media must act as pressure groups in exposing the annihi-
lation embedded in local and global exclusionary ideologies like
neoliberalism, Hindu fundamentalism, Islamophobia, and danger-
ous combinations of these. Unjust realities like Ahmedabad are al-
most always spatially mediated. Policies for justice must therefore,
revolutionize spaces in order to democratize reality.
Acknowledgements
This research was made possible by the Lewis and Clark fund for
Exploration and Field Research sponsored by the American Philo-
sophical Society. Dick Peet’s push for clarity and passion for a bet-
ter world informed and inspired this work. Susan Hanson and
Deborah Martin’s intellectual support was invaluable. Michael Sa-
mers’ endless patience, meticulous editing, and penchant for ‘get-
ting it right’ brought this article to fruition. I am grateful to the
three excellent reviewers who preserved over a very raw version
of this paper. I am always inspired and intellectually challenged
by Waquar Ahmed.
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