Gujarat The making of a tragedy

Gujarat:The Making of a Tragedy is a book about the 2002 Gujarat riots edited by Siddharth Varadarajan.

The book has the following sections: "Introduction", "The Violence", "The Aftermath", and "Essays and Analysis" together with two appendices. Besides two chapters penned by Varadarajan (one as co-author), titled 'The Truth Hurts—Gujarat and the Role of the Media', and 'I salute you Geetaben', the book collects contributions from several journalists, activists, and scholars including Ramachandra Guha, Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt, Teesta Setalvad, A.G. Noorani, Vrinda Grover, Shail Mayaram, Mahasweta Devi, Vibhuti Narain Rai, G.N. Devy, Jyoti Punwani, Nandini Sundar, Mohandas Namishray, and others.

In a review of the book published in India Today magazine, Karan Thapar writes:

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.

Thapar also suggests that just as there is no direct evidence for Hitler's personal complicity in the Holocaust, and his complicity has to be inferred, so also Narendra Modi's complicity in the 2002 Gujarat riots will have to be inferred after constructing and reconstructing the available evidence.

In an Op-Ed in the Times of India, Vrinda Nabar writes that reading this book is a 'numbing' experience. Nabar writes that reading this book makes it obvious that the effort required from the State of Gujarat towards rehabilitation of victims and relief work was found wanting and that ghettoization increased significantly since the riots. Nabar states that this incident was a turning point for pluralism in India.

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