The Hindu : Godhra revisited

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Monday, Apr 15, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Godhra revisited

By Jyoti Punwani

Godhra's Muslims and Hindus tread the middle ground privately... The challenge lies in getting them to acknowledge this in public.

WHEN WILL the Gujarat fire burn out? A first step can be for both communities to apologise to each other. Believe it or not, the religious head of the Muslims in Godhra, where the conflagration began, has already done this more than once at peace meetings called by the Collector.

But no one in Godhra knows about Maulana Hussen Umerji's courageous act. The Hindus who heard his apology made on behalf of his community did not spread the word. Nor, unforgivably, did the Collector. The local press did not even carry the condemnation of the burning of the Sabarmati Express by a senior Muslim of Godhra, though it was faxed to newspapers on March 4.

That is one reason why, if you ask Godhra's residents why Coach S/6 of the Sabarmati Express was burnt on February 27, the answer will depend on the community you belong to. If you are a Hindu, chances are that you will declare it was a Muslim conspiracy aimed at derailing the Ram Mandir movement, and that not only the much-reviled Ghanchi Muslims, but every Muslim railway employee played his role. Two such Muslim employees have already been transferred out of Godhra while a third stoically waits his turn.

If you are a Ghanchi Muslim (the community which stays near the railway tracks), you will declare that since all eyewitnesses say the fire started inside the coach, it was a conspiracy aimed at creating a BJP wave after the party's electoral defeats and decimating Muslims in the State.

A middle ground does exist, which is probably closest to the truth: that the act was a gross over-reaction to provocations by the VHP/Bajrang Dal at Godhra station itself. But the local press has done its best to prevent this theory from being accepted, by not reporting these provocations despite eyewitness accounts available in the town.

There are Hindus and Muslims who saw bearded tea vendor Siddiq Bakr being assaulted on Platform No 1 by a Bajrang Dal passenger (identifiable by his saffron headband). (Incidentally, Hindu railway employees had only good things to say about this particular vendor.) The two bearded Bohras watching the scene from the overbridge, who ran for their lives after some Bajrang Dal passengers rushed towards them from the platform, are locals. The Godhra press admits to knowing that 17-year-old Sophiya Khan was pulled towards the train by a passenger who grabbed her from behind and put his hand over her mouth, only to release her when she screamed `Mummy'.

But it has not, and will not report these provocations. What it does report constantly are unconfirmed reports of plans to blow up Hindu schools in the town, the so-called confession of an alleged SIMI member on how the Godhra burning was planned, the discovery of mutilated bodies of Hindu women from a mosque near the station. The Chief Minister himself has denied this last rumour, but Godhra's Hindus see his denial as a statesmanlike move to prevent further trouble. Neither the SP nor the Collector of Godhra, who maintain that these are false stories, have gone out of their way to announce this to the public.

So low is the credibility of the English press and of private TV news channels among the majority of Hindus, that even when you tell them that you have met Sophiya Khan and her story is true, they refuse to believe it. For them, she is as much a plant as the children in refugee camps who speak into TV mikes of their parents being killed in front of them. They are all part of the grand jehadi conspiracy carried out under the leadership of the local Muslim corporators named as prime accused in the incident, a patently political move. Under pressure to find the culprits, the police, who made no arrests on the spot, have picked up Muslims from their workplaces and continue to conduct brutal combing operations. Expectedly, the men have gone underground, while the women have become experts at overwhelming the police. It is almost sure that those arrested will ultimately be acquitted for lack of evidence, while the real culprits will never be found.

What is difficult to understand is why the VHP travellers on the Sabarmati Express, most of whom were from Gujarat, thought they could get away with misbehaving with Muslims at Godhra. Few Gujaratis have forgotten the burning alive of a family of five Sindhis by Godhra's Ghanchi Muslims during the 1980 Sindhi-Ghanchi riots. The town is notorious for communal riots, and the Ghanchis are well-known all over Gujarat and even outside for their aggressive and impulsive reaction to the slightest provocation.

The VHP travellers surely knew that unlike the few Bohras on the platform, and a Shia from Rustompura who travelled in the same train from Lucknow, the Ghanchis would never say `Jai Shri Ram' when ordered to by them. Nor would they take any assault on their religious identity lying down. The railway police, under pressure for not preventing the burning of the train, openly abuse the VHP for creating a ruckus as a consequence of which innocent passengers died. That the lives of the other Hindu passengers mattered little to the VHP activists is obvious from the fact that they do not even mention those who perished in the fire were unconnected with the Ayodhya campaign. Nor do they seem regretful about being responsible for the ghastly end of so many religious-minded women and children, many of whom were new to the VHP.

For them, the Godhra carnage is primarily a weapon of propaganda which has been so effective that no local Hindu has donated anything for the over 3,000 Muslim refugees from nearby villages, housed in two camps in the town. However, despite the deep resentment among them, Godhra itself has not seen any retaliatory killings, though a lot of Muslim property was destroyed. A major reason is the interdependence of the two sections of Hindus and Muslims who have normally fought each other: the Sindhis who settled here after Partition, and the Ghanchis. After two major riots in 1965 and 1980, the Sindhis have managed to rebuild and prosper, and are not interested in becoming cannon fodder for the VHP. Already, the destruction of Bohra shops in the villages has meant massive losses for them as wholesale suppliers. Hence, it was they who took the initiative just this week, to invite Muslim traders into their area with a guarantee of safety. This at a time when old friends refuse to visit each other's areas, and Hindu and Muslim children go to the same school in separate buses under police escort.

But despite the seemingly unbridgeable divide, spend some time with them, and Godhra's Muslims and Hindus tread the middle ground — privately. The Hindus ask how right is it in a democracy to thrust your religious views on a minority. The Muslims mutter that there's a limit to the amount of religious provocation that can be tolerated. When you are pushed too hard, the Devil can take over, and that should not have happened.

The challenge lies in getting them to acknowledge this in public.

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