Keep it in the Family (1)

I've written in the past about a particular uncle of mine who angered me because he is vocally anti-Muslim, for no real reason that I can see, other than some knee-jerk response. This uncle was the one who, after receiving a few emails and reports that I'd emailed my extended clan on the horrors of Gujarat after the riots, had spent an afternoon in Ahmedabad last year trying to convince me that there was another side to the Gujarat massacre.

He did so by driving me to his wife's old neighborhood in the center of the city and showing me that it was now a Muslim neighborhood.

"See?" he said, as if the justification for the brutal rape, murder, and removal pogroms of which I was so ashamed was as clear as the brown on my face. All that I saw was an unattended neighborhood of poor people who have followed in the footsteps of other poor people. All that I could connect was the tremendous gap between the core city and the "new Ahmedabad" region across the river, where the "saffron flight" had taken the Hindus and Jains with any resources out of the city. And I started to see that all who probably stayed in the city didn't have the means to leave, and that made the Hindus who were there angry because they couldn't leave, and the Muslims angry because the core city was increasingly less protected, less maintained, and less cared for as a result of the demographics of who was living where: the money was now across the river in New Ahmedabad.

Add a few sparks to this tank of kerosene, and watch it burn. The core city is where the majority of the violence has occurred on and off over the past decades, and where the meltdown happened after Godhra.

I wanted to say that it was a neighborhood nothing like the comfortable apartment that he and his wife owned at the time. I challenged him a lot in that ricksha ride, stating that I could not see any new "evidence" as he'd claimed he'd show me. His ability to make the leap from "this used to be a Hindu/Jain neighborhood" to "it was well-deserved" (not something he said, mind you, but that's what I was feeling) blew me away, and angered me to no end.

Is this the son of a great scholar who was respected throughout Ahmedabad for his learned approach towards Gujarati, English, and Jainism? And he has 7 kids, each of whom have kids now. What are they all learning from him?