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Gujarat 2002 and the Indian news media 85

● ‘Kar sevaks’ Literally, this means religious workers. The term has been
widely used for the thousands of supporters who volunteer to help in the con-
struction of a temple to the Hindu god, Lord Ram, at Ayodhya in North India.
The ‘kar sevaks’ were accused of demolishing the Babri mosque at Ayodhya
on 6 December 1992, which set off a rash of Hindu–Muslim clashes in India.

Hindutva and Gujarat
Gujarat is better known as the birthplace of Gandhi, the apostle of peace. But
here, Hindu–Muslim clashes have been endemic – the state has the worst record
of Hindu–Muslim clashes in the country since India’s independence in 1947
(Varshney 2002: 97–98). Three Gujarat towns have been particularly prone to
Hindu–Muslim clashes: Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Godhra. Since the early
1980s, the state has been one of the major areas where Hindutva forces have
focused their attention. Political adversaries of the ‘sangh parivar’ allege that such
forces have treated Gujarat as a ‘Hindutva laboratory’ to conduct political, social
and cultural experiments in order to replicate them in other parts of India.
As Shah (1998: 244) observed,

The Sangh Parivar has disseminated Hindutva ideology in Gujarat over many
decades. The party (BJP) and its allies have built the organization brick by
brick. It began to reap the benefits of these endeavours in the early 1990s and
captured power in 1995.

After the BJP won an overwhelming majority in the state elections in December
2002, months after the pogrom against Muslims, there was much speculation in
the media that the BJP would adopt the ‘Gujarat formula’ to win power in other
states in the country.
Over the years, Gujarat has been turned into a Hindutva powerhouse that the BJP
and the ‘sangh parivar’ often tap into for human and material resources for activi-
ties in other parts of India. Gujarat is one of India’s most prosperous states; people
of the state are known for their business acumen and spirit of enterprise. The factor
of ‘long distance nationalism’ also plays a role, with prosperous Gujaratis in
Britain, the US and elsewhere generously contributing funds to organizations of the
‘sangh parivar’. It is also a fact that in several cities in Gujarat, Hindus and Muslims
are linked together in trade relations, bound by economic compulsions and the
Gujarati language and culture. Hindutva supporters from Gujarat have been in the
forefront of the BJP’s political mobilization. From the late 1980s onwards, the BJP
openly joined other organizations of the ‘sangh parivar’ such as the VHP and the
Bajrang Dal to create a national mood for the construction of a temple in honour of
Lord Ram at Ayodhya, at precisely the same spot where the Babri mosque stood.
Ayodhya has a prominent place in the myths and mists of Hinduism, mainly in
the ancient religious text, the Ramayana. The ‘sangh parivar’s argument has been
that a Ram temple had existed at the very spot on which the Mughal emperor Babur
built the Babri mosque in the sixteenth century to humiliate the Hindus and that the