The 2002 Gujarat pogrom killed over 2,000 Muslims with arrests skewed overwhelmingly against Muslims

Evidence

In 2002, in the Godhra railway station in Gujarat, a train compartment was mysteriously burned down, and fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims were charred to death. With not much evidence to prove their guilt, some Muslims were arrested as the perpetrators. The Muslim community as a whole was collectively blamed for the crime. Over the next few days, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal led a pogrom in which more than two thousand Muslims were murdered, women were mob-raped and burnt alive in broad daylight and a hundred and fifty thousand people were driven from their homes. After the pogrom, 287 people were arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Of them, 286 were Muslim and one was a Sikh. Most of them are still in prison. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 431

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Evidence for how ethnic/communal scapegoating converts a whole community into punishable ‘terrorists’ under state law, parallel to the caste blame dynamics Ambedkar anatomizes.
• QUESTION: Dates of judgment and current status of those POTA detainees worth chasing.
• XREF: connects to: State and police complicity marked the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 521; Gujarat’s 2002 anti-Muslim violence was state-orchestrated and electorally rewarded — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 696