I write of it as a tragedy but there are other narratives possible. It was an act of terror in the most perverse form imaginable. The choice of the eastern parts of Ahmedabad was designed to re-ignite communal carnage. The systematic attack on two main hospitals was most diabolic. It broke both strategic calculations and normative expectations of war and terror. With the choice of hospitals and doctors as possible targets of terror, those who perpetrate this terror have broken free of some age-old limits that governed even acts of terror. In its pathology, in its disregard for even tenuous normative codes, it was terror in its most clinical form designed to gain maximum impact and disrupt all efforts at providing relief to the victims. It was possible to construe these attacks in communal terms. The attackers had made it amply clear that this was a revenge for 2002. They had challenged all-powerful Narendra Modi and his home minister by engineering series of blasts in the constituencies that they represent. This was not lost on anyone; the media was quick to discern the pattern. The attackers had hoped that this narrative would perpetuate itself in the fragile Gujarati society. These attacks were designed to invite retributive and punitive actions on the Muslim community of Gujarat. But the people of Ahmedabad, the Gujarati media and even the political parties and their outfits chose to respond to these attacks as a tragedy. A tragedy speaks of distress, of misery, of terrible misfortune. Tragedy as a distressing, dreadful tale invokes the response of sorrow. The most fitting response to tragedy is passionate lamentation and a resolve to overcome it. By turning the terror strike into a tragedy the people of Ahmedabad changed the semantic ground. This one creative semiotic act was not part of the expected response. People came together in grief, in loss to mourn, to lament, providing succour and care. But not in purposeless, misdirected anger. Retribution was not on their mind. It foreclosed a spiral of violence, at least in the immediate aftermath. In a way this was the best immediate political response possible. It created the semantic framework within which the political parties and the media had to respond. The unequivocal condemnation of the attacks as entirely un-Islamic by persons such as J.S. Bandukwala further narrowed the possibility of retributive violence.

... contd.