Situation returning to normalcy in Gujarat…” drones a news headline. Normalcy. A measure of central tendency. The sanitized average that staunches the unruly ooze of deviations. Seven hundred and fifty human beings, Muslims and Hindus - but mostly Muslims - are dead. Burnt alive. The mobs that lit bonfires of the living in the name of religion and the impassive spectators and neighbours who watched have now dispersed. Thanks to the unflagging effort of Gujarat’s highest elected official. “Where was the delay? I restored sanity in a record 72 hours,” says Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat. This is sanity? Perhaps it is. To a man who has lost his conscience, who represents a majority with no soul. After all, the brute average that underwrites a democracy by numbers is normalcy. The will of people must be respected. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Hareshbhai Bhatt, Vice-President of the Bajrang Dal, protector of the “people’s will”: “There was no rioting. This was an expression of the way the majority community has felt. For years, Hindus have been pushed around.” Did he hire arsonists to restore the will of the people, to soothe their suffering sense of subjugation at the hands of a Muslim community that ranks last nationally in terms of per capita wealth, income, education? “We have our ways. But it all revolves around Hindu anger.” Normalcy is freedom to murder without consequences. After all, isn’t the job of the courts and the police to ensure the greatest good - justice and security - for the greatest numbers? Utilitarianism is nothing if not the philosophy par excellence of the demos. The minorities ruffle the average, they strain at the central tendency at Hindu-ness, Islamic-ness, Christian-ness, white-ness, native-ness, you name it. Democracy by numbers tidies the distribution by purging pesky outliers. In the past, however, we have called this worship of majoritarian sentiment by its kindred name: fascism.

Ehsan Jaffrey, two weeks ago Member of the Legislative Assembly of Gujarat, is now a pile of charred remains, along with several family members and Muslim residents of Gulbarg Society, Ahmedabad. He moved to the Chamanpura locality not to escape the majority - not to live in the ghetto that is the lived geography of fascism - but, rather, to live with ordinary people like him, who were, yes, Hindus by birth but in every other respect no different. So he thought. So says Zakia Naseen, his widow. Ehsan Jaffrey believed - in retrospect, one has to say naively - that because he saw his Hindu neighbours as friends and acquaintances, not as anonymous inhabitants of the reified “majority,” they too would see him, care for him, protect him, as Ehsan Jaffrey, and not abandon him to the mob - as they did, on February 28, 2002 - as a Muslim. He could have - perhaps should have - expected that from the police, from politicians, from courts that serve the majoritarian will. He could not - should not - have expected that from friends and neighbours. But, then, the fault is his. He failed to comprehend the impassive logic of normalcy, which has no place for individuality, for relationships, for difference; no place for Ehsan Jaffreys, only room for the majority sentiment and well-behaved Minorities who respect the central tendency.

Middle-class Gujaratis called friends on cellphones to come merry in the pickings as Muslim businesses on C.G. Road, Ahmedabad, were systematically looted and their owners dispatched with an efficiency that is certain to inspire the neoliberal economist, Deepak Lal, to re-assess his thesis on the endemic inefficiencies of Hindu India. These well-bred middle-class Gujaratis, proud stalwarts of Hindutva, were simply aiding the central tendency, were they not, by normalizing the population?

Ayub Qureishi, recently resident of Naroda-Patiya on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, is one of those fortunate Muslims who survived the pogrom. He can now enjoy the fabulous sum of 100,000 rupees for each family member killed that the Government of Gujarat, in its unending benevolence, has assessed as proper compensation for “affected” members of the minority (members of the majority “affected” by the horror at Godhra will receive 2,00,000 rupees per family member killed). Spared by the random mercies of the mob, Ayub can look forward to his large cache of money and an endless cache of time to re-live memories of his seven-year old daughter and a five-year old son roasted alive - now that the “situation is returning to normalcy in Gujarat…”

Welcome to the democracy by numbers. Only those with deference to the popular will allowed. Dissenters will be summarily removed, at their expense.

____________________________
Vinay Gidwani
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography and
Institute for Global Studies
University of Minnesota
414 Social Sciences Bldg.
267-19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Phone: 612-625-1397
Fax: 612-624-1044
Email:  vgidwani@atlas.socsci.umn.edu