Salimbhai Sindhi who lives in Al Falaha Relief Colony in 2009 was a picture of confidence as the owner of a cattle farm, having found a measure of success in rebuilding his life. However, he recalls the time a few years back when he was sarpanch of Kidiad village and there was a total sense of chaos and confusion during the violence in 2002 and ‘nobody knew what to do.’ Salimbhai's wife, son and 18 others from his extended family were among 74 other Muslims from his village who were killed by mobs when they were fleeing their village. Out of the 74 Muslims from Kidiad village who were killed on the highway in Panchmahal district by mobs when they were fleeing their village packed in two tempos, 62 bodies were not found and were declared missing for up to seven years until they were finally declared dead. The violence that had pushed more than one and a half lakh Muslims into relief camps and others to places of Muslim concentration caused increasing polarization of population along religious lines. By 2008 however, increasingly voices from within the community began to urge Muslims to move on from the violence and in the run up to the 2012 assembly elections more Muslims than ever before expressed support in public for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party that was in power at the time of the violence in 2002 and that had continued to emphatically win elections in the state.

How does displacement affect the experience of citizenship rights? Displacement with regard to the ‘refugee’ is understood to create a radical disjunction between a person's familiar ‘way of being’ that affects the social and the personal (Daniel and Knudsen, 1995, pp. 6, 9) where the new reality of socio-political circumstances also entails altered parameters of daily life. In the troubled waters of the Indian nation-state however, and in the context of Gujarat in particular that has claimed to have leapfrogged on the path of development since the violence in 2002 that caused displacement of Muslims and where there is public support among a number of Muslims for the same government after a decade, this becomes a pertinent question. According to the government of Gujarat normalcy had been established in the state within 72 hours of the outbreak of violence on 28 February 2002.