The Hindu : Riot victims leaving Gujarat?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 27, 2002

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Riot victims leaving Gujarat?

By Manas Dasgupta

AHMEDABAD APRIL 26. Sporadic incidents of violence continued in several parts of the Ahmedabad today in which at least one person was killed in police firing and seven persons, including two policemen, were injured in stabbing and stone throwing.

An indefinite curfew has been clamped in the entire Vejalpur police station area since this morning, extending it from three chowkies where curfew was imposed earlier. Several localities of Jamalpur and Raikhad under the Gaekwad Haveli police station were also brought under curfew following a night-long battle between two communities. According to Ataullah Khan, one of the organisers of the camp, which is behind the city Police Commissioner's office, about a 1,000 inmates of the camp had approached him for help to leave Gujarat.

About 30 per cent of the 5,000 camp inmates have already left, some back to their houses, but most of them have left the State. "Only yesterday, 15 families left for Indore to stay with their relatives there,'' he said.

The rush for leaving the camp has increased in the last couple of days and the immediate provocation was the violence outside the camp on Wednesday in which one of the camp organisers, Inamul Iraki, had been named in an FIR for "leading a violent mob" of about 60 people from the camp to Navadhpura, some distancefrom the camp. Two other inmates were also named in the FIR, but the 17 arrested so far are not from the camp. The arrest of the inmates has surprised many because the shops that had been allegedly set on fire by the mob, led by Iraki, were owned by Muslims. Iraki, who has since gone underground, said on the mobile phone that if rioting had been his intention, he would have set on fire shops owned by the Hindus just opposite the camp. Besides, at the time of the attack, when the FIR claimed he was present at the site of the incident, he was at the railway yard clearing a consignment of relief materials sent from Karnataka.

Even top police officials doubt if the FIR was based on facts. One of them said no evidence was there to establish the Sangh Parivar's allegation that the Muslims from the relief camps attacked the properties owned by Hindus in the vicinity.

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