The Hindu : Carnage caught live

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 30, 2002

National

National

Carnage caught live

By Our Special Correspondent

Noor Jehan, one of the riot victims from Gujarat, watching a documentary on the communal violence at a ``meet the press'' in New Delhi on Monday. — Photo: Rajeev Bhatt

NEW DELHI APRIL. 29. The full horror of the violence in Gujarat was brought to the capital in a video documentary `In the name of Faith'. The film made over one and a half months of the continuing carnage records the destruction in a State where one young girl asked the film maker, Pankaj Shankar ''is this government only yours .. is it not ours' because we are Muslim ''

The film tells the brutal truth of mass burials of unrecognisably charred and dismembered bodies, the desperate stories of children who bore witness to the inhuman acts of violence that have left them orphaned, the use of fire as a weapon of obliteration.

It is a story that has already been told a hundred times. A story that is heard over and over again but seems to evoke no response. This lack of response, said the film-maker Mahesh Bhatt makes us all, and not just the government and the people who killed and murdered, complicity in the carnage that continues in the State. ''All of us, because of our silence and indifference, are responsible for the genocide in Gujarat''.

In Delhi are some of the many survivors whose testimonies the film records. Present, according to director Pankaj Shankar, so that even the most cynical person in the audience would be forced to believe that his camera does not lie.

They have come from refugee camps, unwilling to return to the villages which are their families graveyards.

Sulaiman bhai, sarpanch of Kediagam, in Sabarkantha district, who has been forced to live in the Muqdoom relief camp in Modasa since March 2, said that they seem to be there for ever since the Government ``wants to do nothing about rehabilitating us.''

The groups which includes survivors from all the major massacres _ which the NHRC recommended should be investigated by the CBI _ has asked for a meeting with the Home Minister, L K Advani.

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