http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/27/international/asia/27INDI.html?ex=1028785737
Religious Riots Loom Over Indian Politics
July 27, 2002
By CELIA W. DUGGER
AHMEDABAD, India - Here in the adopted hometown of Mohandas
K. Gandhi, the great apostle of nonviolence, Hindu mobs
committed acts of unspeakable savagery against Muslims this
spring.
Mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched.
Young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight, then
doused with kerosene and set on fire. A pregnant woman’s
belly was slit open, her fetus raised skyward on the tip of
a sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed
across the city.
The violence raged for days and persisted for more than two
months, claiming almost 1,000 lives. It was driven by
hatred and sparked by a terrible crime: a Muslim mob stoned
a train car loaded with activists from the World Hindu
Council on Feb. 27, then set it on fire, killing 59 people,
mostly women and children.
The carnage that followed here in the western state of
Gujarat has become a festering political sore because of
widespread allegations that the Bharatiya Janata Party, the
Hindu nationalist party that leads India and Gujarat, and
the World Hindu Council were complicit in the attacks on
Muslims. The party and the council - both part of the same
Hindu nationalist family - deny the charges.
But official statistics provided in June by the Police
Department, now under new administration, show that the
state of Gujarat - the only major one in India governed
solely by the Bharatiya Janata Party - failed to take even
elementary steps to halt the horrific momentum of violence.
The day after the train attack, for example, police
officers here in Ahmedabad did not arrest a single person
from among the tens of thousands who rampaged through
Muslim enclaves, raping and looting as well as burning
alive 124 Muslims.
Police officials and survivors said in interviews that
workers and officials of the party and the council were
complicit in the attacks and, in some cases, instigated the
mobs.
“This was not a riot,” one senior police official said
angrily. “It was a state-sponsored pogrom.”
Party officials who lead the national government, while
publicly condemning the attacks, resisted opposition calls
for a forceful assertion of the central government’s
authority to halt the violence as it dragged on for more
than two months.
Fathoming what happened here in the first major outbreak of
Hindu-Muslim violence in almost a decade is critical for
India. The specter of such violence has shadowed the
country since its birth.
India, a secular democracy, and Pakistan, an Islamic
nation, were hacked apart when they won independence from
Britain in 1947. The furies of religious hatred were
unleashed, and about a million people died.
The use of religion for political gain is an enduring theme
in both India and Pakistan and a wellspring of violence
that vexes the subcontinent even today.
Senior national leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party,
including Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, have
maintained that India’s tolerant Hindu ethos has helped
guarantee religious freedom for India’s billion-strong
population, which includes 820 million Hindus and 130
million Muslims.
Until the violence in Gujarat, the party, which has led the
national government since 1998, had proudly pointed to the
absence of Hindu-Muslim violence during its years in power
as evidence of its secular credentials.
But many influential Indians are once again questioning
whether the party can be trusted to ensure that Hindus and
Muslims live together in peace and to resist the temptation
of exploiting religious divisions to reap Hindu votes.
Gujarat, a state of 51 million people, has over the past
decade become the country’s laboratory for Hindu
nationalism. That ideology has long depicted Muslim and
Christian Indians as converts to foreign religions who must
accept the primacy of Hindu culture. Gandhi’s assassin was
an extreme adherent of this view - and for decades, the
Hindu nationalist movement was a political pariah as a
result.
In the recent carnage in Gujarat, most of those killed were
Muslims. Among the survivors, 100,000 became refugees in
their own country. More than 20,000 homes and businesses
were damaged or destroyed, along with 360 Muslim places of
worship.
The events have inspired an anguished outpouring from many
Indian intellectuals.
“Gujarat disowned Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi long ago,”
Ashis Nandy, one of India’s leading social thinkers wrote
in Seminar, a monthly magazine that addresses domestic and
international problems in India. “The state’s political
soul has been won over by his killers.”
In an interview in June, the state’s chief minister,
Narendra Modi, offered no consolation to the state’s
Muslims and expressed satisfaction with his government’s
performance. His only regret, he said, was that he did not
handle the news media better.
“We have 18,600 villages,” he said in his office, where a
photograph of Gandhi hung on the wall. “Ninety-eight
percent of Gujarat was peaceful. Is it not a credit for the
administration, the government?”
Mr. Modi was a longtime party organizer and pracharak, or
preacher, from the source of the Hindu nationalist
movement, the Association of National Volunteers. He was
handpicked less than a year ago by the Bharatiya Janata
Party’s high command to turn around its fading fortunes in
the state.
[Mr. Modi dissolved the state assembly on July 19 to bring
on elections. In the usual practice, he resigned and was
named caretaker chief minister while he led the party’s
political campaign.]
At the national level, too, hard-liners in the party appear
to be on the upswing. Lal Krishna Advani, India’s home
minister, who represents Gujarat in Parliament, was
elevated recently to be India’s deputy prime minister and
is expected to succeed the aging Mr. Vajpayee as the
coalition’s standard-bearer.
In the late 1980’s, Mr. Advani led a movement to build a
Hindu temple in Ayodhya, on the site of a 16th-century
mosque said to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram.
That movement was critical to the party’s rise to power and
culminated in the mosque’s demolition by Hindu zealots in
1992, igniting the last major spasm of Hindu-Muslim
violence, which left more than 1,100 people dead, most of
them Muslims.
Mr. Advani said he regretted the mosque’s destruction, just
as he has decried the violence in Gujarat. Still, he stood
by Mr. Modi, and at a recent news conference, said that Mr.
Modi’s government had generally performed well.
Others disagree. The National Human Rights Commission,
headed by a retired chief justice of the Supreme Court,
concluded that the state’s efforts were “a comprehensive
failure.”
The commission released a confidential report on June 12
that named officials from the Bharatiya Janata Party who
have been accused by survivors and witnesses of instigating
the violence. It noted that many politically connected
people were yet to be arrested.
“These are grave matters indeed,” the commission wrote,
“that must not be allowed to be forgiven or forgotten.”
An Attack and a Vengeful Mob
The train that pulled into
Godhra station at 7:43 a.m. on Feb. 27 was packed with more
than 1,500 volunteers of the World Hindu Council, who were
returning from Ayodhya, where they had agitated once again
for construction of a temple on the site of the demolished
mosque.
Roused by religious fervor, hundreds of devotees poured out
of the train at Godhra station, which is in the middle of a
densely packed Muslim slum. A Muslim vendor was ordered to
say “Hail Ram” and refused. The Hindu activists yanked his
beard and beat him, said a state police investigator.
As the train pulled out, an angry Muslim crowd pelted it
with stones. No one seems certain why, but the mob’s fury
focused on coach S6. Stones crashed through the windows. A
flaming rag soared inside, landing on a synthetic leather
seat that caught fire. Police investigators say that as
many as 16 gallons of gasoline were poured onto the floor.
Fifty-nine people were killed.
Fury over the atrocity came fast. Within hours, a Muslim
driver was pulled from his rickshaw and killed with a
cricket bat. Hindu mobs burned down shops in the city and
threw stones at a mosque.
The World Hindu Council called a general strike for the
following day, Feb. 28, to protest the killings. Senior
police officials say the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s
endorsement of the strike made violence virtually
inevitable.
Mashiha Qureshi, an 11-year-old Muslim girl, and her family
fled to the safety of Juhapura, the city’s largest Muslim
ghetto. The family’s house and five businesses were gutted
by fire. She is now afraid to live among Hindus.
“Somebody might catch me, kill me, throw me under a train,”
she said. “There are good people. There are bad people.
Some save you, some kill you. But how do you know which is
which?”
The chief minister, Mr. Modi, said he gave clear
instructions that the police were to deal with any violence
firmly.
But in a country where authorities routinely round up
suspects to head off Hindu-Muslim violence, the Ahmedabad
police did not make a single preventive arrest the day of
the train attack, city police officials said.
P. C. Pande, who was city police commissioner at the time,
and C. K. Chakravarthi, who heads the state police, refused
repeated requests for interviews.
Other senior police officials - sickened by what happened,
but unwilling to be quoted by name - contradicted Mr. Modi.
One official said the chief minister directed that the
police “should not come down harshly on the Hindus
tomorrow.”
As a result, they said, no clear orders were given.
Two
large massacres took place on Feb. 28 in Ahmedabad, a
gritty city of 3.5 million people, as the police stood by
or, according to some witnesses, aided the mobs.
Thirty-nine people were killed at the Gulbarg Society, a
walled compound that was home to Muslim families in the
midst of a largely Hindu neighborhood.
The mob started gathering in the morning. By early
afternoon, more than 10,000 Hindu men assembled, many armed
with stones, iron rods, tridents, swords and homemade
bombs, screaming: “Beat them! Burn them! Cut them!”
Muslim women and children in the neighborhood had gathered
in the home of Ehsan Jafri, a Muslim and a former member of
Parliament from the Congress Party. They believed he could
protect them.
Through the day, witnesses said, Mr. Jafri made
increasingly frantic calls to the city police commissioner
and other powerful people, among them Amarsinh Chaudhary,
who was the state Congress Party president and a former
chief minister of Gujarat.
Mr. Chaudhary said he, in turn, called the heads of the
city and state police forces. The third and last time Mr.
Jafri called, he wept, begging: “Kindly help me. They will
kill me. My society is burning.”
The police arrived in numbers only large enough to take on
the mob at about 4 or 5 p.m. - too late to save the women
and children, who burned to death with Mr. Jafri, survivors
said.
The next day, the smell of roasted flesh still hung heavy
in the ruins of the residential complex. K. G. Erda, a
senior police inspector, was standing outside, watching as
people carried on with their looting.
He said the few officers who had been there the day before
had stayed in the traffic intersections, only firing at the
mob when it stoned the police. He and other officers had
called for reinforcements, he said, but none came. In fact,
he said, 10 policemen, including two high-ranking officers,
were called away.
“What can two or three policemen do when confronted by
20,000 people?” Mr. Erda asked.
The second massacre of Muslims unfolded in a poor area
called Naroda Patia, where 11-year-old Mashiha and her
family lived.
Many survivors accuse leaders of Hindu nationalist groups,
among them Bipin Panchal, known to many as Bipin Bhai, of
leading the mob.
A man in the World Hindu Council’s front office confirmed
that Mr. Panchal was a council worker. Days after the
atrocity, Mr. Panchal said his shop had been damaged by
fire and looted. The Muslims had attacked, he claimed, and
he had only defended himself.
“They live here in India and pray for Pakistan,” he said
contemptuously. “They only deserve one treatment. They
should pack their bags and board the train to Pakistan.
There should be no Muslims here.”
He denied even belonging to the World Hindu Council.
Mr.
Panchal has since been charged with being a leader of the
mob and is said to have absconded. However, an official at
the Naroda police station said the police knew where he was
but had been instructed not to arrest him.
On the day these two massacres took place, Feb. 28, no one
was arrested for participating in the violence. The next
day, 55 people were killed, but only 93 arrests were made.
State officials would later point to the large number of
Hindus arrested to prove the police were vigilant. Here in
the city the police have arrested more than 3,500 people -
but those arrests came belatedly, after the carnage had
already gotten out of control.
Asked about the failure to make arrests early on, Mr. Modi,
the chief minister, asserted that the police had fired into
the mobs to halt the violence.
Yet in the three days after the train attack - when Muslims
were overwhelmingly the victims of violence - the police
killed more Muslims than Hindus, 22 to 14, in what was
ostensibly an effort to stop attacks on Muslims.
An alliance of nonprofit groups, Citizen’s Initiative,
surveyed almost 2,800 Muslim families. But Mr. Modi
dismissed the charges.“Not a single complaint has been
registered like this,” he insisted. Instead of rooting out
those who may have been complicit, Mr. Modi used his
authority to penalize officers who enforced the law, senior
police officials say. They cite what they describe as
punitive transfers of four police superintendents in March.
Mr. Modi called the transfers a “purely administrative
decision.” But several officials confirmed that Mr.
Chakravarthi, who heads the state police, wrote a letter
protesting the transfers and commending the men for their
handling of the violence.
The transferred police officials told dramatic stories of
confronting mobs.
One officer, Himanshu Bhatt, recalled arriving at a Muslim
village surrounded by a Hindu mob of 15,000 that was
brandishing swords and scythes. Already, 14 Muslims had
been killed. Mr. Bhatt immediately gave the order to fire.
A deputy headman from a neighboring Hindu village was
killed, and the mob ran away.
Mr. Bhatt said he took great pride that all the Muslim
inhabitants were home cooking dinner by the next evening.
Rahul Sharma, another officer, described rescuing 400
children, ages 6 to 14, at an Islamic school that was
surrounded by a mob of 8,000 armed with swords, pipes and
soda bottle bombs.
“We fired tear gas, but the wind was against us and it blew
back on us,” he said. “So we fired three rounds of musket
fire. Four or five were injured. The entire crowd
vanished.”
“I don’t think any other job would have allowed me to save
so many lives,” he said. “That is a bank balance for a
lifetime.”
As the violence in Gujarat continued into April, the
political and civic outcry across the country rose, as did
pressure on the central government. Mr. Modi’s role became
an issue, with even some of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s
own allies calling for his dismissal. After a bruising
debate in Parliament, the central government finally
dispatched a senior retired police officer, K. P. S. Gill,
to advise Mr. Modi.
Mr. Gill arrived on May 3 and within days, the city’s three
top police officials were replaced. K. R. Kaushik, the new
police commissioner, said he immediately issued orders for
the police to arrest anyone gathering in a mob. By the
evening of the next day, May 11, he said, the violence was
under control.
Unapologetic, Separate, Hopeful
Today, there is no more apt symbol of the divide between
Hindus and Muslims in Ahmedabad than the road separating
Juhapura, the Muslim ghetto where so many sought refuge
during the carnage, from neighboring Hindu areas.
The Hindu houses back up to barbed wire fences and high
brick walls topped with jagged shards of glass. The windows
in virtually every house on both sides were shattered in
the rock throwing that accompanied the violence.
It is as though the Muslims of Juhapura and the Hindus in
adjacent neighborhoods live in separate nations. They refer
to the road that divides them as a border. It has the
appearance of a war zone that has come under heavy
shelling.
But as desolate as the road looks today, it ends on a green
field, called Unity Ground, where Hindus and Muslims used
to play cricket together.
Days after her husband, the former Muslim parliamentarian,
was burned alive by a mob, Zakia Jafri, 65, still clung to
the idea of an India where Hindus and Muslims lived in
peace. For years, she and her husband resisted their
children’s entreaties to leave their majority-Hindu
neighborhood. Mrs. Jafri, haggard and grief-stricken, vowed
to go home to their burned-out apartment and start over.
“That is my husband’s memory and dream,” she said. “I will
not abandon it.”
But the lack of remorse among many Hindus has slowed the
healing among Muslims. Mrs. Jafri said recently that none
of her Hindu neighbors ever came to her to express sorrow
that they could not save her husband. She asked, “How can I
go back to such a place?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/27/international/asia/27INDI.html?ex=1028785737
Wohi Hota Hai Jo Munzoore Khuda Hota Hai … :nahna: