"I first visited Ahmedabad in 1979, and in the following decade went back often for both professional and personal reasons. Then I began research on Gandhi, and my attachment to the city deepened even more. In the summer of 2002, on my first trip back after the horrific riots that had taken place earlier that year, I naturally went to the Sabarmati Ashram, where I spent some time talking to one of the Trustees, a quiet, self-effacing man who had spent thirty years in the service of Gandhi. In the course of our conversation, he told me that the Gujarat riots of 2002 were "the second assassination of Mahatma Gandhi'.
"The person under whose watch those riots took place, the then chief minister, Narendra Modi, was entirely educated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization whose sectarian, xenophobic ideology is utterly at odds with the capacious and open-minded worldview of Gandhi himself."
Read Ramachandra Guha's column
here.