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Central Gujarat is often called the ‘laboratory of Hindutva’. This paper examines how complicity during the Gujarat pogrom in 2002 was tied to an imagery of sacrifice invoked through a language of ritual and diet. By means of the spectacle of uncanny terrorism, the deployment of sacrificial language, rumours of abduction of young women, and circulation of images of excess, a Hindu victim was mimetically constructed through Muslim victimisation. Ahimsa, initially deployed as an ethical critique of the violence of sacrifice, was transformed into an element of violent identification contributing to widespread complicity among residents of the city of Ahmedabad.

In the context of mobilization for Hindu nationalism, processes of stereotyping a familiar other, the neighbourhood Muslim, play a significant role in fomenting experiences that confirm stigmatizations. These experiences concern the figure of the Muslim that arouses a phantasmagoria of fear, disgust and anger. Fear surrounds the 'Muslim' as she invokes the possibility of terrorism and calls for heightened security measures. Disgust is the register of a radical identification with a new form of hyperbolic vegetarianism. Anger, however, is what allegedly fuels the violence of the masses. This article investigates enunciations and representations that relate directly to consumption and production of meat in concrete quotidian practices: vegetarianism and rejection of animal sacrifice. It argues that the affect of disgust for meat has become an important cultural relay in the vegetarian politics of the state. By insisting on an identity formulated in the language of non-violence, it simultaneously renders permissive identification with violence.In the context of mobilization for Hindu nationalism, processes of stereotyping of the familiar neighbourhood Muslim are significant in fomenting experiences that confirm stigmatizations. Stereotypes often include wide-ranging and contradictory tropes -from linking Muslim fertility and excessive consumption to puritanical piety and doctrinal rigidity; from naïve superstition and lack of proper education to arrogant theological sophistication and Islamic radicalism. Such representations are less important as descriptions of the particular social standing or predicament of those subjected to them than as evidence of important experiences of those wielding and ascribing stereotypes. As Herzfeld 1 has pointed out, stereotypes are always generative and creative, and, by rendering intimate the abstraction of otherness, they become an important signature of nationalist identification.This article examines the relation of Hindu stereotypes of Muslims to the consumption and production of meat in concrete quotidian practices and conceptions of diet and worship: meat-eating, vegetarianism and the rejection of animal sacrifice. It is a relation that carries the power to arouse the affect of disgust and can produce the most pronounced sentiments of moral indignation including even physical experiences of nausea and collapse. 2 Disgust for a substance and by extension for those associated with it, however, does not engender stable representations, but on the contrary collapses distinction culminating in intimate experiences and proximity to the subject of stigmatization. *

This article describes quotidian practices that make use of urban flows in the city of Ahmedabad: erecting roadside structures such as temples and performing urban expiation rituals at crossroads. Both are exemplary for how intimate division relates to vernacular spatial configuration, the former by inscribing religious markers into areas, the latter by expulsion of individual misfortune. While roadside structures become sites of communal identification, conversion, and violent incorporation, expiatory practices displace an unwanted element onto an anonymous resident who carries it away.