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Mohammed Memon,60, and his wife Roshanben Memon,55,
parents of Saleembhai at their home in Tandalja, a mainly Muslim area in Baroda, Gujarat.(IOL photo) |
The slight young woman pulls a dust-covered suitcase from underneath her bed and rummages through it. She retrieves what she has been searching for and smiles briefly as she takes a photograph out of the clear plastic cover that has protected it for the last five years.
"That's him. That's Saleembhai ," says Firoza Banu Saleembhai Memon . "That's my husband before he died; before they killed him." The 25-year-old widow pauses for a moment, flanked by two of her three children. Her youngest child, 6-year-old Muskan Banu, squints at the image of a man in his prime, a father she does not remember.
Firoza Banu's husband had acid thrown into his face before being stabbed and beaten to death in Baroda, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, five years ago. The reason for his murder was simple: He was a Muslim.
Today the 27-year-old auto-rickshaw driver is little more than a precious memory of a father, husband, and son a family has lost, a man among thousands of victims of some of the worst communal rioting to ravage post-partition India. The carnage began in February 2002, when rioters claiming to be pro-Hindu nationalists embarked on a frenzy of murder, rape, looting, and arson.
Atrocities were sparked in retaliation after 58 people were killed when a train carrying Hindu pilgrims was set alight in Godhra, eastern Gujarat, on February 27, 2002. Three months of widespread systematic violence aimed primarily at Muslims followed as the state, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, descended into a bloodbath.
| Though the majority of victims were Muslims, rioters did not spare lower-caste Hindus, Adivasis and Christians who stood in their way. |
Red-Handed Government
More than 200,000 people were displaced from their homes and around 2,000 people murdered in central and eastern Gujarat in a series of pogroms, the precision and organization of which led many, including India's then-president Kocheril Raman Narayanan (now deceased), to accuse the Gujarat state government of being complicit in them.
The day Firoza Banu became a widow is one she can recall as if it were yesterday. The family was forced to flee its home in the district of Tarsali, Baroda, when mobs began to loot and burn shops and homes nearby. Packing his wife, children, and parents into his auto rickshaw, Saleembhai told his older brother Yaseenbhai to drive his family to an emergency camp in a village a few kilometers away, and that he would follow later since there was no room in the auto rickshaw for him. It was the last time Firoza Banu saw her husband.
Police officers discovered Saleembhai's body dumped in a waterway a day later. The auto-rickshaw driver's license in his wallet was the only way to identify him.
"Because he was not fit to be seen, because of his injuries, we did not see his body…[When I was told he was dead] I could not believe that this was true. He was such a good man. He got on well with everyone. I feel bad for my children. They have lost their father," she says.
Indiscriminate Rioters
Though the majority of victims were Muslims, rioters did not spare lower-caste Hindus, Adivasis (indigenous people who are mainly animists), and Christians who stood in their way.
| A bench of senior justices criticized the state police for harassing witnesses |
For Lalitaben Keshubhai Parmar, being a Hindu was of little help when a petrol bomb claimed the life of her 36-year-old husband Keshubhai as he was cycling home from his work at a textile factory in April 2002.
The father of two was a stone's throw from his home in the religiously mixed colony of Dani Limbra, in Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad, when rioters threw a Molotov cocktail at him, neither knowing nor caring who the next casualty on their list would be. Keshubhai remained conscious for four days in hospital until a shortage of blood meant he would bleed to death.
"What's the point in opening an old wound? This was in my fate. Who do I forgive?" This is what 36-year-old Lalitaben asks in the home she once shared with her husband. Her work-worn face, devoid of the bindi (a decorative dot that married Hindu women wear on the forehead), is angry.
Her feelings are echoed by her Hindu, Christian, and Muslim neighbours in Dani Limbra, an area that, unusually for areas in Ahmedabad, remains religiously diverse. The neighbourhood escaped much of the 2002 violence as people of different faiths from the area jointly patrolled the neighbourhood during riots to maintain calm.
Half a decade on, the majority of people responsible for the atrocities in Gujarat remain free. On the rare occasions people have been brought before the courts to answer for their involvement in the violence, the political and social climate in the state has meant prosecutions have been fraught with difficulty.
A retrial of 21 people in the Best Bakery case, for the murder of 14 people burned alive in a bakery in Baroda in March 2002, had to take place not in Gujarat but outside the state in the city of Bombay. Judges in Gujarat were forced to acquit the accused during the first trial due to lack of evidence.
A bench of senior justices criticized the state police for harassing witnesses, a humiliating castigation that forced the Gujarat government to admit its prosecutors had made mistakes when recording vital witness evidence.
Though nine of the defendants in the Best Bakery case were eventually convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Bombay last year, the Indian Supreme Court's decision to indict legislators from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for intimidating witnesses in the case illustrates the links between the carnage and high-ranking BJP members. The BJP governs the state now, ruled in Gujarat in 2002, and was also in power nationally (at federal level) five years ago.
| neighbouring Gujarat has witnessed increased segregation between Muslim neighbourhoods and Hindu areas. |
Lack of Justice
Human rights workers have warned that because no effective political counterbalance exists to rival the influence of the BJP and other Hindu nationalist organizations, the majority of those responsible for the 2002 riots and those guilty of other acts of communal violence in India will never have to answer for their crimes.
It is this lack of justice, secular campaigners believe, that now fuels the growth of systematic communal violence and tension in the subcontinent, since extreme right-wing Hindu groups are largely free to operate with impunity.
While the BJP denies any involvement in the Gujarat atrocities or in more recent spates of communal violence, the political influence it — and other political and social groups that actively promote Hindu nationalist policies — wields is undeniable.
The BJP is part of the Sangh Parivar (SP), an organization that, with more than five million members, is the patriarch where groups including the BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) seek guidance and protection.
The viability of these organizations, and with it their aim to promote Hinduism in India, hinges on the political and financial support they receive from Hindus in the subcontinent and abroad.
Though the pattern is not being repeated throughout the subcontinent, anecdotal evidence suggests growing division between millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians and a rise in violence against non-Hindus in parts of India where the BJP rules, whether alone or as part of a coalition.
New government school textbooks praise fascism in the BJP-ruled northern state of Rajasthan, while neighbouring Gujarat has witnessed increased segregation between Muslim neighbourhoods and Hindu areas.
In the eastern Indian state of Orissa where the BJP governs as part of a coalition, and in the BJP-led central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), Christians have been attacked and their churches burned and Muslims have also reported violence and harassment, recent changes that have provided the perfect conditions for the seeds of communal friction to prosper and bear fruit.
| The victimization continues to this day with continuous threats and stone-throwing. |
Bitter Harvest
At the Baroda Cycle Shop in Baroda, 46-year-old Abdulbhai Rasheedbhai Soni (name changed) reaps the rewards of this bitter harvest. He works deftly, fixing a broken bike with hands filthy with bicycle chain oil.
The shop, a cabin barely 10 feet square, is littered with screwdrivers, spanners, tire tubes, and empty glasses of chai (Indian tea). It lies on the "wrong" side of the tracks in Fatehpur Adaniya Pul — wrong because he is a Muslim with a shop on prime land that edges onto a predominantly Hindu area.
Soni learned the hard way the price that must be paid for being of the "wrong" faith. The harassment and violence first began 17 years ago, he says, when his shop and his home above it were set alight by rioters chanting extreme right-wing Hindu slogans.
He adds that he was also arrested several times under various antiterrorism laws, tortured while in custody, but released without charge. The victimization continues to this day with continuous threats and stone-throwing.
The married father of three says that no one has had the troubles they have had in that family. "The [Gujarat] government does nothing, the police don't help us. … The police have gone against us because the [Gujarat] government tells them to behave in a certain way and they do. Harassment of Muslims is getting worse, not better. If good people get into government, then things will be better."
In Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad, Haleema Masi Allah Raka Mansoori has lost faith in the wisdom of politicians. The 67-year-old's son Maulana Ahmed Hussain Allah Raka Mansoori was taken by Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) police officers in the city four years ago, amid allegations he was involved in terrorism.
Maulana Ahmed Hussain, a 34-year-old madrasah teacher, was one of around 1,000 mainly Muslim men who were arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in the wake of the 2002 riots.
The act, that has since been repealed — though not retrospectively — was used to detain those alleged of being involved in terrorism. Though some of those arrested have since been released, around 180 people, including Maulana Ahmed Hussain, remain in custody today.
"The Hindu right-wing's objective is to make India a Hindu country so all people should be Hindu."
Dr. Pran R. Parichha said. |
I will Never Forgive Them
A ceiling fan whirs noisily, disturbing a tatty poster of Makkah hanging on a wall in Haleema Masi's one-room home in Paanch Kuan, in Ahmedabad's old city, as she says her son was singled out because of his religion.
"Maulana was working in a madrasah, teaching children the Qur'an. That's why he was arrested. The police thought he was training children and young people [to become terrorists]. … I will never forgive them [the police and Gujarat Government] for what they have done. It's up to Allah to change these people; I don't have the strength," she adds.
Two months after Haleema Masi's son was arrested, right-wing Hindu nationalists in Orissa proclaimed the state would become the country's second Hindu state after Gujarat. When Christians in the tiny village of Biriguda in south Orissa discovered their local church had been set alight on Christmas Eve last year, they soon learned the gravity of this ominous prophecy.
The desecration was the most recent in a series of attacks targeting churches, preachers, and members of Orissa's 1.1-million-strong Christian community.
The Rev. Dr. Pran R. Parichha, president of the Orissa Chapter of the All India Christian Council, accused the SP of deliberately orchestrating violence against Christians.
He added, "The Hindu right-wing's objective is to make India a Hindu country so all people should be Hindu. There should not be any other religion. They are terrorizing the minority religion groups and trying to convert them to Hinduism."
In Orissa, as in other parts of India, the widespread reach of the SP, which provides free education in thousands of schools and has influence in political parties, trade unions, student unions, women's groups, and charities, provides an unparalleled framework with which to peddle its ideology.
The SP has organized free schooling in more than 3,000 schools in Orissa alone, while the RSS strengthened its foothold in the state after a cyclone ravaged the region in 1999 and the southeast Asian Tsunami tore through Orissa in December 2004.
Being among the first to help with relief efforts, RSS members extended their influence by capitalizing on natural disasters both to raise the organization's profile and to attract funds from Indians living at home and abroad. In areas hampered by poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment, the efficiency with which these groups helped Hindus proved crucial in gaining popular support.
Dr. Angana Chatterji, an associate professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies who has researched communal tension in Orissa since 1995, warned that systematic violence by right-wing Hindu nationalists against Muslims, Dalits (Hindus who are outside the caste system), and Adivasis in Orissa was also growing and that the state government has turned a blind eye to the violence on its doorstep.
The echoes seem to be reverberating to the heart of India. Investigations carried out by secular groups in the central state of MP reveal a similar recent increase in violence against Muslims and Christians since the BJP won a majority in the state elections in December 2003.
Ram Puniyani, General Secretary of the nationwide All India Secular Forum, said the degree of systematic violence perpetrated against Christians and Muslims in MP, much of it carried out with the knowledge of the MP state government, had increased, and that tension was spreading to areas that in the past had witnessed little faith-based violence.
"The idea is that you have to keep these [Muslim and Christian] communities under check and that their activities are curtailed. It is systematic. ... It's a slow-boil process that's always on and then some problems are accelerated at certain times," he added.
| "I am still frightened that something like this will happen again. The people who did this are still free; they have not been punished." Firoza Banu said. |
Abuse of Power
Rakesh Sahni, Chief Secretary of the Government of Madhya Pradesh, refuted allegations that the state government had failed to stem communal violence, adding that the MP government was committed to upholding communal harmony and acted "promptly" and "effectively" to stop isolated incidents from turning into major communal situations.
A similar rebuttal was issued by officials at the Orissa state government who said accusations that the government was ignoring communal violence were totally wrong.
Upendra Nath Sahoo, Undersecretary at the Government of Orissa Department of Home Affairs Social Section, added, "There were some instances in Biriguda but after that nothing has happened. There was no communal violence before that."
The central Indian government has been more circumspect and is due this year to table before Parliament the Communal Violence Bill 2005, the first piece of legislation aimed specifically at faith-based violence.
The bill has, however, been criticized for giving police officers — who are often accused of being involved in communal violence or ignoring it when it takes place — too much authority that will then be open to misuse.
Allegations of power abuse by the RSS and SP have been denied by Ram Madhav, the national spokesman for both groups. He admitted that "a problem" exists between Hindus and Muslims in certain parts of India but added that troublemakers from Christian and Muslim communities caused 90 percent of the communal riots in India. He said, "We try to talk to Muslim leaders. What is most important is for both communities [Hindu and Muslim] to come together and sort out the problems instead of trying to depend on political leaders … to try to build a good rapport so that even if there is provocation, it should not lead to violence."
Sidharth Nath Singh, BJP's national spokesman, condemned the 2002 Gujarat riots and also rejected any suggestion that the BJP had fomented communal violence.
He said, "I absolutely deny that we [the BJP] have been doing these things, promoting communal violence. … If Muslims feel they are being harassed in Gujarat, they should come to the center [the national capital New Delhi] with proof. They don't have any proof. … It's all rhetoric."
Back in Gujarat, assertions made by politicians that communal violence is not a problem mean little to people like Firoza Banu, whose life changed irrevocably after the riots five years ago.
"I am still frightened that something like this will happen again. The people who did this are still free; they have not been punished. All politicians are the same. We hope that this will not happen again, that it will not increase … that we can all live in peace."
(Gujarat government officials were unavailable for comment, despite repeated attempts to contact them.)
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