Harsh Mander on Raj Kamal Jha's novel about Gujarat carnage

Raj Kamal Jha's latest novel 'Fireproof' that deals with the Gujarat riots (carnage) is out. In Hindustan Times, Harsh Mander takes Jha to task for 'demonising only the foot soldiers of hate, not the real masterminds'.

'The novel virtually absolves the State form its enormous crimes of omission and commission in its planning and complicity with the crimes, its tacit or compact with political and social formulations that fomented hatred of a scale never witnessed in independent India.", writes Mander.

Mander says that Jha's treatise rarely extends its outrage beyond individual responsibility. It ignores the larger politics and social perspectives that drove the carnage, the organisations that systematically manufactured hatred over decades, mounted poison that entered people's souls, and meticulously planned a systematic cleansing of a segment of citizens of different faith to break almost fatally their spirit. He takes Jha to task with his final comment where he terms it an 'unwitting betrayal'.