What the statistics also hide are the differences between – to take a crude example – communal flare-ups at a procession in Delhi from a few months ago, and the 1984 riots, where citizens from one particular community were brutally assaulted for a number of days; or to compare it with the 2002 Gujarat riots where the state mechanism completely failed in its duty to protect a section of its citizens. If, according to the author, it would take decades to state anything conclusively, then this discrepancy in the data would also gloss over the differences between these incidences and the lynching of Mohammed Aqlaq in Dadri. We will suspend judgement on whether the curious case of cattle vigilantes will be recorded as a communal incidence, since these vigilantes have the ability to take the law in their own hands by investigating and giving instant penalty to those transporting cows (even, it is alleged, in cases where the transporters perhaps have the legal permit to do so!). In the framework employed by Subramanya, it seems they are just the same, all incidences of communal violence, with one being comparable to the other. By doing this communalisation is reduced to one set of numbers neglecting the complex and qualitative changes in the nature of the socio-cultural atmosphere of the country.