The killers who participated in recent, government-sanctioned anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat will likely get away scot-free, says the Economist. There have been no convictions to date. None.

…not a single murderer has been convicted, although perhaps 2,000 people died. The state government is under pressure from local activists, human-rights groups and India’s staunchly interventionist Supreme Court to see that justice is at last done. But it continues to act less like a scourge of illegal violence than its sponsor.

In retaliation for the deaths of 58 Hindus who burned alive in a train under suspicious circumstances, 2,000 Muslims were massacred in Gujarat:

Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP’s leader and, at the time, prime minister, seen as a moderate, asked “Who lit the fire first?”. That foreigners and the liberal English-language press in Delhi largely ignored the Godhra massacre, concentrating on the killings of Muslims—some 9-10% of Gujarat’s 50m population—heightened the sense of grievance.

Taking a hardline Hindutva position led to serious electoral gains in Gujarat:

It helped Mr Modi lead the BJP to a landslide victory in state elections in December 2002.

But, writing in the Washington Post, Salman Rushdie sees hope in the recent Indian elections:

The Congress Party’s success in Gujarat suggests that voters have been sickened by what they have seen, just as Gandhi’s fall in 1977 was an expression of national disgust at her government’s brutalities.

I absolutely understand ‘an eye for an eye,’ and there have been religious tensions in Gujarat for years. Centuries, if you want to go back that far. But this is not just a bloody barroom brawl, it’s massively disproportionate revenge killing against a small minority, more akin to Hutus (85%) slaughtering Tutsis (15%). It’s the single biggest stain on the Indian conscience in the last ten years, ranking far above routine police brutality and more like the Sikh massacres of 1984 and those of Partition.

Update: The Indian Supreme Court has torn the Gujarat government a new orifice:

It described the Gujarat police investigation of the case as “anything but impartial” and the state leaders as “modern-day Neros.” The court said the events in Gujarat were “unprecedented and abnormal” and asked the panel to submit its findings every three months and post them on the Internet.