Presentation :

Violence in the westernmost state of Gujarat in India according to official estimates caused one and a half lakh people to flee their homes. Many of them permanently moved to places of Muslim concentration and an 20 940 families moved to makeshift houses built by Muslim organisations who labelled them as displaced while the government claimed that they had moved to these ‘resettlement' colonies of their own volition. In addition to the state government's denial of displacement, tracking people's movement that constitute masses of unaccounted population within the border of a country provides methodological challenges. It is also difficult to gather evidence that is not discernable in existing forms of aggregate data such as census or property market data. In my work on displaced persons therefore, analysis was mainly informed by a grounded analysis based on interviews with displaced persons, community workers, NGO practitioners, officials and party functionaries. In order to discern institutional practices governing population flows a complex of archival work, government resolutions, policies and correspondence of the Government of Gujarat with Human Rights Commission and National Minorities Commission were also used to study population movement due to communal violence.