Photo: Shailendra Pandey

IT’S BEEN an instructive week at TEHELKA. Intensely. The politicians have been eerily silent. Or disturbingly evasive. The people have spoken. In reams and cascades. On e-mail, through SMS, through letters and on phone. It’s been a task this past week manning the floodgates; as we went to press, the response was still streaming in. Congratulation. Outrage. Concern. Even abuse. No matter what you do, it’s foolhardy not to expect abuse in India.

But we have been clear why the truth of Gujarat 2002 had to be told — it’s about where we have fundamentally erred as a people and a nation, it’s about critical and urgent lessons we need to learn. That is why we called it the most important story of our time. Hearteningly, the preponderant response to the story has affirmed that sense. Something deeply violative and vile happened in Gujarat. And it awaits correction — punishment to the guilty, justice to the victims. That’s the call that rings again and again through these letters. Over to them.