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Gujarat: Creating Spaces for Dialogue, Justice and Reconciliation. |
Fellows' Symposium on Dialogue Processes
in India Special Research on Reconciliation and Justice in Gujarat for Dialogue, Justice and Reconciliation.
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This Roundtable held in New Delhi on July 28, 2007 was host to over sixty practitioners, academics, intellectuals, and civil society leaders working in a variety of areas related to the issues of justice and reconciliation in Gujarat. WISCOMP’s involvement with the situation in Gujarat began in May 2002 when we hosted a Discussion on Civil Society Initiatives in Gujarat in New Delhi. Here, the implications of a number of citizen’s reports were discussed, with an eye towards making this information more widely available to civil society. After this event, WISCOMP began to work with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in order to carefully study the wide range of contributions that the international community has brought to the field of justice and reconciliation, from both theoreticians and practitioners. This study resulted in a joint Symposium on Reconciliation in South Asia: Exploring the Terrain. The goal of this symposium was to explore the possibilities for a regional understanding of reconciliation, drawing on South Asia’s vibrant diversity of religions, languages and cultures. In keeping with our commitment to the development of both theory and praxis in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding, after the Symposium of 2005, we began to explore the possibility of conceptualizing a peacebuilding project in Gujarat, based on the model of the WISCOMP Athwaas initiative in Jammu and Kashmir. Harsh Mander’s research on justice and reconciliation in Gujarat was a next step for WISCOMP, to seek a fuller picture of the challenges and opportunities for reconciliation in Gujarat. The Roundtable convened in July 2007 was the most recent step this direction. It provided an opportunity for further collaboration between Harsh Mander and WISCOMP, and sought to look more closely at the challenges of reconciliation in Gujarat, by bringing together contributions from a wide range of knowledge and experiences. The Roundtable used Mander’s work as a focal point from which to begin discussion on various aspects of justice and reconciliation in Gujarat. Participants at the roundtable highlighted several issues including the significance of the political context of communalism in India, the experiences of people living and working in Gujarat, the situation of Muslim women in Gujarat, the pattern of violence and the bias in school textbooks. The discussion of the day was personal, moving, insightful, and recognizing of the complexities of the situation in Gujarat.
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