The Hindu : Genocide in the land of Gandhi

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Sunday, Mar 10, 2002

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Genocide in the land of Gandhi

The violence in Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat was unparalleled for its barbarism. Anjali Mody reports

Living in fear.

THERE WAS a brutality to the carnage in Ahmedabad, which even in a city with as long a history of communal conflagrations as this one, was unprecedented. They reel off the list of past convulsions — 1969, 1980, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1992. But this one, almost everyone is agreed, is different. One senior police officer told us, "the intention this time was mass murder of Muslims".

Another police officer said the violence in Gujarat was not a "riot". "A riot involves a clash of two groups. In every conflict in the State before this one both sides suffered. Both shared a sense of loss, both could turn to the State for help. This time the Muslims alone have been under attack with what appears to be the backing of the State."

Prof. Shamsie, a retired University professor, described it as a "State-sponsored conspiracy... they spared no one... they attacked hutments... bastis and flats where High Court judges live... it was like ethnic cleansing''. His son, Arif Shamsie, a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, who returned from abroad to live in his home city four years ago, said, "they were just waiting for an opportunity... they knew where to go, who to get and what to do."

They are not the only ones who see a design in the carnage of the last 10 days. Even senior police officers with long years of experience working in this troubled State say there was nothing random about the attacks. One officer, who described the carnage as "genocide", said, "a substantial amount of homework was done before hand... they knew which shop, business, factories... which home belonged to a Muslim". "They" — victims, witnesses and police officers are all agreed — are the warriors of the Sangh Parivar, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal.

The attacks in Ahmedabad, took in every class and treated them all alike. Killing and robbing and burning them. The violence in Ahmedabad and the rest of Gujarat was unparalleled for its barbarism. Entire families were burnt alive in their homes. Police officers say this method of brutality was tested during the Surat riots of December 1992 when 40 Muslims were burnt alive in a room in the Chokha Bazaar area. This time it has been used to great effect. In just one case in Ahmedabad over 20 people were killed inside a mosque in Naroda-Patiya. Burning people alive, a police officer said, was "Hitlerite".

Hanif Lakdawala, a social activist with the NGO, Sanchetna, said the intention was to create so much fear that people only felt safe among their own. He said there was a definite method: "First to economically cripple the community, destroying businesses, factories, and all movable property and then to terrify the people." The attacks were also calculated to hit those parts of the city that had not seen a communal conflict, such as Navrangpura, Satellite Road, Vastrapur and Shahibagh on the west bank of the Sabarmati where Muslims are in a minority. He said already the city "is divided into Muslim areas and Hindu areas", what they want to do is "complete the ghettoisation".

Across the city, in relief camp after relief camp, survivors told the same story. They were attacked by a large mob. The timing of the majority of the attacks was mid-morning of February 28, the day of the VHP bandh in the State, although many took place on March 1, more than 24 hours after a "curfew" was imposed. The attackers were mostly "outsiders". Survivors from industrial estates such as Vatwa and Naroda have named local men with criminal backgrounds and commonly known to work as mercenaries. Many in the mob were armed with swords and knives. The police force either did not answer calls for help or was itself the attacker, pushing the fleeing people towards the mob by firing at them or hemming them into narrow lanes. Shops and houses were looted and set on fire using petrol bombs or rags soaked in petrol, and LPG and oxygen "bottles".

Police confirm this pattern. So do the 200 Hindu families in Anand Flats relief camp in Gomtipur. All residents of Chunnilal ki chali in Bapunagar, their story is identical to their Muslim neighbours' — a mob attack ("hamare Hindu log hi the") and they fled. Their homes were fire-bombed, nothing remains, not even a cooking pot. The only difference is that all — men, women and children — have arrived at one place and are accounted for. Their Muslim neighbours, however, now scattered across the Aman Chowk and Bakar Shah ka Roza relief camps are incomplete families, with many names figuring in the lists of injured and missing.

Outside Ahmedabad, in the rural areas of Kheda, Mehsana and Panchmahal, where communal violence was barely known, mobs have emptied entire villages of their Muslim residents. The same tools of terror employed in the city were utilised to brutal effect — looting, arson and death. In Pandarwara in Panchmahal and Sardarpura in Mehsana those incarcerated before being burnt to death included little children. The survivors have walked to villages where there are enough Muslims to ensure their safety in numbers or have been rescued by the Army and dumped in relief camps in the city.

In Ahmedabad there are also reports of sexual assaults and rape, including of a girl as young as 12. They are told in whispers, or by victims too young to comprehend the implications of what has been done to them. As always this is a subject that few, even in the affected community, want to deal with. The burden of rape must be borne by the victim alone. She and those who seek justice for her are likely to be ostracised. Police confirmed that they knew of cases of survivors who were raped. They also said that at more than one scene of carnage, the charred bodies of women suggested they had been raped, killed and then burnt. One social worker said that by suppressing these crimes an injustice is done and the sense of being wronged, of the humiliation of an entire community, festers.

There was also another element to the pattern of violence never seen before in Ahmedabad: a systematic destruction and desecration of mosques, dargahs and mazars. Countless such buildings were either partially or fully destroyed. The mosque in the middle of Naroda's busy bazaar was a few hundred meters from the local police station and the mazar of poet Vali Gujarati stood in the middle of the road between the police lines and the Police Commissioner's office in Shahibagh.

In some places all that remains of a mosque or a dargah is the memory of those who knew it stood there 10 days ago. The civil administration, which has been slow to do anything for the people <147,1,0>of Ahmedabad made destitute by the violence, has been quick to erase any signs that these buildings actually existed. It has levelled the land and removed the rubble at the sites of 22 mosques and mazars, turning them into vacant plots, or in the case of Vali Gujarati's mazar into part of the road that runs by the Police Commissioner's office. Sonal Mehta of the People's Union for Human Rights and an old Ahmedabadi said, "it is not only the people they want to get rid of... but also the history of this city which gives them a place in it... it is like Ayodhya".

In many places in the city, Maha-artis, a public ritual favoured by the VHP, were held — including at the Mansa Masjid in Bapunagar and Noor Masjid in Hardasnagar — and statues of Hanuman placed inside. Even now saffron flags hang from the minarets of desecrated mosques. No one dares remove them. Apparently not even the police. Why? A police officer said it was "the determination to humiliate a whole community with the full arrogance of state power." This is the pattern. Like medieval raiders they plunder, rape and destroy places of worship of other communities. The virility of their culture and their political agenda seems to be judged by their power to destroy.

Unquestionably, there was police complicity in the carnage. The city Police Commissioner, P. C. Pandey, appeared to disown the responsibility of stopping the carnage by saying it was hard to control the violence as the policemen on the street were communal. What could he, a mere Police Commissioner, do against a community of bigots policed by bigots? But the fact is, as many police officers agree, Ahmedabad was bloodied because the police high command and the civil administration allowed it to be bloodied. There is little doubt that those who carried the lists of targets — the shops to burn and loot and the homes to seek and destroy — were all familiar to the police.

But, Mukul Sinha, a civil rights lawyer, said the mobilisation of the mob was done by those at the top. He said that apart from identifiable VHP/Bajrang Dal "leaders", the mob was made up of "normal ordinary people... with a consistent communal approach". He said, "if you keep hammering into them that they must seek revenge... they will". He described as "diabolical" the constant repetition, by everyone from the Chief Minister and former RSS pracharak, Narendra Modi, that the violence unleashed on the State was a "reaction" to the Godhra killings.Survivors, journalists and police all speak of men with saffron bandanas or scarves, who were part of the mobs which rampaged through Ahmedabad, stopping people and forcing them to say "Jai Shri Ram".

In the Gomtipur area, Mohan Bundela, a social activist with the Jan Sangharsh Morcha, witnessed the assault by a mob of a few hundred, led by 30 or 40 men carrying swords and trishuls and wearing "kesari patkas". Mr. Bundela said the slum opposite Ambika Mill No 8, was attacked by men shouting "Jai Shri Ram".

He said the mob collected petrol from a local police sub-inspector called "Modi" which then went into empty mineral water bottles to form the incendiary devices that burnt down the slum of some 260 hutments.In such poor neighbourhoods, the Ahmedabad Development Authority is busy bulldozing "encroachments", slums that have existed for 10, 15 sometimes 20 years, and taking over the land. The residents of these areas were, according to James Dhabi, of the St. Xavier's Social Service Society, people who had previously been displaced by riots and the changing geography of the city. They have lost everything in the carnage; importantly all their papers such as ration cards which provide proof that they lived in the city and have claim to any piece of it. Without such proof and with the State determined not to let them return it seems they will have to go. "But where will they go," wondered Father Dhabi. To safer places. To neighbouring States.

A convenient way for this Government to get rid of a population it sees as less than human, a population that will never be part of its vote bank.

The killing may have ended for the time being, but the hate campaign continues. Hindu volunteers at relief camps have been threatened with violence (by people of their own community) and forced to stop their work in some places. Pamphlets calling for a boycott of Muslim businesses and making other inflammatory statements are in wide circulation in the city. Amid this there is talk of "peace", of returning to "normal''. But the chasm that divides this city seems unbridgeable. A Muslim police officer said he felt ashamed to be working in the city's police force and that his intention was "to leave this State or leave the service".

Arif Shamsie, who returned to India four years ago because he felt he had "something to contribute to my country", is wondering if he had made the worst decision in his life. This decision to leave, the regret at returning, is what the Sangh Parivar intended. It hopes the police officer and Mr. Shamsie will follow the hundreds who are already, belongings in hand, walking down the State's highways towards its borders.

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