by Harsh Mander
Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days
after the terror and massacre
that convulsed the state. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my
shoulders aching with the burdens of guilt and shame. As you walk
through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmadabad, in which an
estimated 53,000 women, men, and children are huddled in 29
temporary settlements, displays of overt grief are unusual. People
clutch small bundles of relief materials, all that they now own in
the world, with dry and glassy eyes. Some talk in low voices, others
busy themselves with the tasks of everyday living in these most
basic of shelters, looking for food and milk for children, tending
the wounds of the injured. But once you sit anywhere in these camps,
people begin to speak and their words are like masses of pus
released by slitting large festering wounds. The horrors that they
speak of are so macabre, that my pen falters in the writing. The
pitiless brutality against women and small children by organised
bands of armed young men is more savage than anything witnessed in
the riots that have shamed this nation from time to time during the
past century. I force myself to write a small fraction of all that I
heard and saw, because it is important that we all know.
Or maybe also because I need to share my own burdens. What can you say
about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spared? Her
assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her foetus and
slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say about a family of
nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then
electrocuting them with high-tension electricity? What can you say? A
small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his mother and six
brothers and sisters were battered to death before his eyes. He
survived only because he fell unconscious, and was taken for dead. A
family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements in
Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a young woman and her three month old son,
because a police constable directed her to 'safety' and she found
herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused her with kerosene and
set her and her baby on fire. I have never known a riot, which has used
the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence
in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat.
There are reports every where of gang-rape, of young girls and women,
often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their
murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one
case with a screw driver. Women in the Aman Chowk shelter told
appalling stories about how armed men disrobed themselves in front of a
group of terrified women to cower them down further. In Ahmedabad, most
people I met - social workers, journalists, survivors - agree that what
Gujarat witnessed was not a riot, but a terrorist attack followed by a
systematic, planned massacre, a pogrom. Everyone spoke of the pillage
and plunder, being organised like a military operation against an
external armed enemy. An initial truck would arrive broadcasting
inflammatory slogans, soon followed by more trucks, which disgorged
young men, mostly in khaki shorts and saffron sashes.
They were armed with sophisticated explosive materials, country
weapons, daggers and trishuls. They also carried water bottles, to
sustain them in their exertions. The leaders were seen communicating on
mobile telephones from the riot venues, receiving instructions from and
reporting back to a co-ordinating centre. Some were seen with documents
and computer sheets listing Muslim families and their properties. They
had detailed precise knowledge about buildings and businesses held by
members of the minority community, such as who were partners say in a
restaurant business, or which Muslim homes had Hindu spouses were
married who should be spared in the violence. This was not a
spontaneous upsurge of mass anger. It was a carefully planned pogrom.
The trucks carried quantities of gas cylinders. Rich Muslim homes and
business establishments were first systematically looted, stripped down
of all their valuables, then cooking gas was released from cylinders
into the buildings for several minutes. A trained member of the group
then lit the flame, which efficiently engulfed the building. In some
cases, acetylene gas, which is used for welding steel, was employed to
explode large concrete buildings. Mosques and dargahs were razed, and
were replaced by statues of Hanuman and saffron flags. Some dargahs in
Ahmedabad city crossings have overnight been demolished and their sites
covered with road building material, and bulldozed so efficiently that
these spots are indistinguishable from the rest of the road. Traffic
now plies over these former dargahs, as though they never existed.
The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the state police
and administrative machinery is also now widely acknowledged. The
police are known to have misguided people straight into the hands of
rioting mobs. They provided protective shields to crowds bent on
pillage, arson, rape and murder, and were deaf to the pleas of the
desperate Muslim victims, many of them women and children. There have
been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the minority
community, which was the target of most of the mob violence. The large
majority of arrests are also from the same community, which was the
main victim of the pogrom. As one who has served in the Indian
Administrative Service for over two decades, I feel great shame at the
abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration.
The law did not require any of them to await orders from their
political supervisors before they organised the decisive use of force
to prevent the brutal escalation of violence, and to protect vulnerable
women and children from the organised, murderous mobs. The law instead
required them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially,
decisively, with courage and compassion. If even one official had so
acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could have deployed the police forces and
called in the army to halt the violence and protect the people in a
matter of hours. No riot can continue beyond a few hours without the
active connivance of the local police and magistracy.
The blood of hundreds of innocents is on the hands of the police and
civil authorities of Gujarat, and by sharing in a conspiracy of
silence, on the entire higher bureaucracy of the country. I have heard
senior officials blame also the communalism of the police constabulary
for their connivance in the violence. This too is a thin and
disgraceful alibi. The same forces have been known to act with
impartiality and courage when led by officers of professionalism and
integrity. The failure is clearly of the leadership of the police and
civil services, not of the subordinate men and women in khaki who are
trained to obey their orders. Where also, amidst this savagery,
injustice, and human suffering is the 'civil society', the Gandhians,
the development workers, the NGOs, the fabled spontaneous Gujarathi
philanthropy which was so much in evidence in the earthquake in Kutch
and Ahmedabad? The newspapers reported that at the peak of the pogrom,
the gates of Sabarmati Asram were closed to protect its properties; it
should instead have been the city's major sanctuary.
Which Gandhian leaders, or NGO managers, staked their lives to halt the
death-dealing throngs? It is one more shame that we as citizens of this
country must carry on our already burdened backs that the camps for the
Muslim riot victims in Ahmedabad are being run almost exclusively by
Muslim organisations. It is as though the monumental pain, loss,
betrayal and injustice suffered by the Muslim people are the concern
only of other Muslim people, and the rest of us have no share in the
responsibility to assuage, to heal and rebuild. The state, which bears
the primary responsibility to extend both protection and relief to its
vulnerable citizens, was nowhere in evidence in any of the camps, to
manage, organise the security, or even to provide the resources that
are required to feed the tens of thousands of defenseless women, men
and children huddled in these camps for safety. The only passing
moments of pride and hope that I experienced in Gujarat, were when I
saw men like Mujid Ahmed and women like Roshan Bahen who served in
these camps with tireless, dogged humanism amidst the ruins around
them. In the Aman Chowk camp, women blessed the young band of
volunteers who worked from four in the morning until after midnight to
ensure that none of their children went without food or milk, or that
their wounds remained untended. Their leader Mujid Ahmed is a graduate,
his small chemical dyes factory has been burnt down, but he has had no
time to worry about his own loss. Each day he has to find 1600
kilograms of food grain to feed some 5000 people who have taken shelter
in the camp.
The challenge is even greater for Roshan Bahen, almost 60, who wipes
her eyes each time she hears the stories of horror by the residents in
Juapara camp. But she too has no time for the luxuries of grief or
anger. She barely sleeps, as her volunteers, mainly working class
Muslim women and men from the humble tenements around the camp, provide
temporary toilets, food and solace to the hundreds who have gathered in
the grounds of a primary school to escape the ferocity of merciless
mobs. As I walked through the camps, I wondered what Gandhiji would
have done in these dark hours. I recall the story of the Calcutta
riots, when Gandhi was fasting for peace. A Hindu man came to him, to
speak of his young boy who had been killed by Muslim mobs, and of the
depth of his anger and longing for revenge. And Gandhi is said to have
replied: If you really wish to overcome your pain, find a young boy,
just as young as your son, a Muslim boy whose parents have been killed
by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy like you would your own son, but bring
him up with the Muslim faith to which he was born. Only then will you
find that you can heal your pain, your anger, and your longing for
retribution.
There are no voices like Gandhi's that we hear today. Only discourses
on Newtonian physics, to justify vengeance on innocents. We need to
find these voices within our own hearts; we need to believe enough in
justice, love, and tolerance.
---
[The writer, is a serving IAS Officer, who is working on deputation with a development
organisation.]
The Campaign to
Stop Funding Hate
Enver Masud, "5,000 Killed, 50,000 Homeless
in India 'Pogrom'," The Wisdom Fund, March 16, 2002
[Narenda Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, who is also a member
of the R.S.S., explained the killings as an ''equal and opposite
reaction'' (a statement he later denied) to the murder in late
February of almost 60 people, most of whom were Hindu activists, by
a mob of Muslims. The Human Rights Watch report disputed this
defense, charging that the Hindu nationalists had planned the
Gujarat killings well in advance of the attack on the Hindu
activists. It cited widespread reports in the Indian media that
suggest that a senior Hindu nationalist minister sat in the police
control room in Ahmedabad issuing orders not to rescue Muslims from
murder, rape and arson.--Pankaj Mishra, "The Other Face of Fanaticism," New York Times,
February 2, 2003]
[A number of Hindu groups in the US and Britain, classified as
charities and therefore entitled to tax-exempt status, raise funds
for ostensibly apolitical projects in India and the west. In fact,
the FT has learnt, significant sums go to causes controlled by
members of the RSS.--Edward Luce and Demetri Sevastopulo, "Blood and
money," Financial Times, February 20, 2003]
[India's refugee population increased last year with 1,00,000
Muslims fleeing from their homes, pushed by "Hindu nationalists",
says the US Committee on Refugees, a non-governmental body, in its
latest annual review.--T.V. Parasuram, "One
lakh Muslims fled Gujarat after riots: Report," Express India,
June 13, 2003]
"Godhra bogie was burnt from inside:
Report," Times of India, July 3, 2002
Mark Oliver and Luke Harding, "He is blamed for the death of 2,000 Muslims in India. So why is
Narendra Modi in Wembley?," Guardian, August 18, 2003
[In recent years, the world has been shocked by the Taliban's ruthless
suppression of women in Afghanistan, the practice of female genital
mutilation in parts of Africa and the abuse of female domestic labor in
places like Saudi Arabia. Yet it is the world's largest democracy that is
the undeclared winner in the contest of violence against women.--Swami
Agnivesh, Rama Mani and Angelika Kšster-Lossack, "Missing:
50 million Indian girls," International Herald Tribune, November 25,
2005]
[Sen's argument for his idea of India is constructed not just in opposition
to Western stereotyping but also to the homegrown Hindutva ("Hindu-ness")
movement, which in recent years has sought power on a platform asserting
that India is a Hindu nation that ought to be a Hindu state, while defining
Hinduism in crudely
sectarian terms, both as a religion and as a badge of cultural and political
identity. In several of the essays in this collection, Sen demolishes each
of these "narrow and bellicose" premises of Hindutva, along with Western
religious reductionism. . . .
Sen points out that Ashoka's edicts promoted the human rights of all in the
3rd century before Christ, a time when Aristotle's writings on freedom
explicitly excluded women and slaves, an exception the Indian monarch did
not make. At a time when the Catholics of Europe were tyrannizing each
other, persecuting Jews with the Inquisition and burning heretics at the
stake, Akbar was proclaiming in Delhi that "no man should be interfered with
on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion
that pleases him." Unlike in the West, Indian secularism has tended not to
be about the separation of church from state and the prohibition of
religious activities but about tolerance of a profusion of religions, none
of which is privileged or favored by the state. To Sen, "the Hindutva
movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India
itself."--Shashi Tharoor, "Book Review: The Argumentative Indian by Amartya
Sen," Washington Post, 2005
[ . . . the arrests of Hindus in a terrorism case and the use of the new tag
"Hindu terror" have sparked enormous controversy.--Rama Lakshmi, "In India, Controversy
Over Hindus' Arrests Terrorism Case Sets Off Politicking, Protests,"
Washington Post, November 24, 2008]
