The Once and Future Riot

From “our greatest living comics journalist” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), a revelatory investigation of deadly sectarian riots in Uttar Pradesh, India, that explores the mechanics, dynamics, mythologies, uses, and abuses of political violence everywhere Compared to other episodes of lethal Indian communal violence, the clashes in Uttar Pradesh in 2013, the Muzaffarnagar Riot, were a relatively small-scale affair—some scores of people were killed and several tens of thousands displaced. It had happened before and will probably happen again: Hindus and Muslims, armed with guns and swords, riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turn on one another. The truth fragments along religious lines, both in the lead-up to the rampage and in its bloody aftermath.