Erased from our memory by high-rise buildings and malls, Gurugram, and the Mewat region that sprawled to its south, imploded into a macabre carnival of killing during Partition. “Whole villages were razed; scores of mosques desecrated; thousands killed or forced on pain of death to convert to Hinduism”, historian Ian Copland writes, “and many more thousands were forced to flee.”
For months afterwards, scholar Yasmin Khan records, corpses from Gurgaon washed up in the irrigation canal in Mathura. Each of those bodies told the story of how communal politics set fire to a largely peaceful region, turning it into a stage for one of the largest ethnic-cleaning campaigns in recorded history. The story warns us that the incendiary politics that led to Gurugram—an icon of India’s economic ambitions—could easily set off larger fires, with serious consequences for the entire country….
After the truth-shower 