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The Milli Gazette, March 16-31, 2002
Eyewitness account: ‘We shall be killed tonight’
By Aziz Burney
On Friday night while we were staying in Ahmadabad state guest
house for a short while, there was a phone call from the Muslim
majority area of Shahpur requesting Shabana Azmi, member of
Parliament (MP), to do something soon otherwise tonight we shall
be killed. Hearing this Shabana burst into tears and told me that
exactly the same thing had happened in Mumbai earlier. A crowd of
seven thousand people has encircled Shahpur and Watoajwapura, the
worst-affected areas. The situation is very critical and
explosive and anything can happen any time.
The true position of Ahmadabad can be understood from the
following fact: On Friday night, BBC’s reporter Rehan Fazal
requested for a room in the 5-star Taj Residency Hotel. The hotel
manager asked him to give a Hindu name for staying in the hotel.
On Rehan’s reply that he cannot do so because he cannot
change his name which is mentioned in his visa and passport, the
manager said that in that case he cannot stay in his hotel. Rehan
narrated this incident to Communist Party of India (CPI) leader
Sita Ram Pachori.
I have come to Ahmadabad alongwith Amar Singh, Raj Babbar,
Shabana Azmi and Sita Ram Pachori, all members of Parliament.
An idea of the critical situation can also be had from the fact
that the Police Commissioner, CN Pande, told the delegation that
for making a round of the city on duty, he has got his beard
shaved that very day. Similarly, ANI correspondent told them that
he has shaven his beard today itself because people are being
identified after disrobing them in the affected areas. Whatever
he and Rashtriya Sahara Hindi editor, Govind Dikshit, have seen
during one hour only is really terrible.
Upto a distance of only a few hundred metres from the airport
around fifty vehicles were lying burnt. This was the scene in a
market where all shops belong to Muslims. On going slightly
further, they are stopped by police. High police officials say
that you cannot go beyond the guest house and must stop there. At
the airport also a police officer had advised us that our
venturing into the city will not be safe. The previous day
Defence Minister George Fernandes was harassed and misbehaved.
Police and high administrative officials give us details of the
dangerous and terrible situation of the previous two days on
condition of not mentioning their names.
We are at the moment in the state guest house from where Amar
Singh talks to Chief Minister Narendra Modi on phone No. 2866343
and tells him that they are continuously receiving phone calls
from the riot-affected people and tells him that the delegation
wants to visit VS Hospital. Modi says that their going to the
hospital is fraught with dangers. When we could not provide
proper security to George Fernandes how and what security can we
provide you, he says. When Amar Singh says that we have police
escort with us, Modi said that your going there will lead to
increased tension. Thereafter, Raj Babbar tells Modi on phone
that a telephone call has just now been received from Bapu Nagar
saying that shots are being fired from the residence of the
Gujarat state home minister Govardhan Jhaparia. On being asked
about Modi’s reply, Raj Babbar said that he says that you
know who keeps arms. Hindus do not keep arms. At that moment Amar
Singh said that despite danger to our lives, we must go there.
According to him, this was a planned and organized official
terrorism.
Then Sita Ram Pachori talks to Modi on phone and insists on going
there. Modi said that your faces and ideas are known to everybody
and hence we cannot guarantee your safety. Pachori said that this
was a direct threat from the chief minister. Shabana also talked
to Modi who told her too that your going there will further
increase the tension.
During our conversations with Modi the state health minister
Ashok Bhat and BJP’s youngest MLA, Bharat Pandya, were with
us in the guest house. They said that they could have deployed
the army the previous day but did not do so because last rites of
those killed in Godhra incident are yet to be performed. Pandya
named only a few other places, including Jamalpur, where greater
tension prevailed and where Hindu-Muslim population ratio is 30
and 60 respectively. When we told him that tension is prevailing
in the whole of Ahmadabad, he admitted it and said that people
are face to face throughout the city. On being told that the
former MP, Ahsan Jaffery, who was killed the previous day, was
continuously asking for security on phone for six hours, he said
that this former MP had at first fired on the crowd.
In the meanwhile UNI Mumbai’s reporter Sushil Parekh, who
had come to Ahmadabad, enters our guest house accompanied by
cameraman Uday Ivor. Sushil’s Indica car and his luggage
were set ablaze the previous evening in Behrampura and both of
them were shaken. They said that they kept asking for shelter for
four hours in the riot-hit areas but no one obliged.
We came to know in the guest house that the worst affected people
of the city are in Al-Ameen Hospital. On my asking the health
minister about the location of this hospital, he expressed his
ignorance, adding that this is probably a private hospital.
It was here also that we came to know that in Watoajwapura area
of the city, around two hundred and fifty first class restaurants
were reduced to ashes, including Samanwar Hotel (Rs 20 million
loss), Kabir Restaurant, Sunflower, Jhajjhar Bangla, Raj Kamal,
Tasty Restaurant near Police Post, Abhilasha in Bajrapur, Topaz
Hotel, Tulsi Ram Restaurant etc. etc. Burnt ashes can be seen
everywhere here.
In spite of police warning, we tried to move out of the guest
house but at that very moment a crowd of roughly two hundred
people surrounded us. A local leader, Khurshid Sayyed, came
forward and said only he knows how he had been able to reach
there. He said right in the presence of dozens of policemen there
that we should not trust them. We can of course trust the army.
He requested and insisted that we should not to go to the
riot-hit areas. According to him, he did not see such a terrible
and horrible situation since 1959.
At that very moment Aaj Tak TV channel representative, Awasthi
who had come alongwith Geroge Fernandes, arrived there. He told
us that his Tata Sumo car was excessively stoned and he ran for
his life. He also advised us not to go out. Aaj Tak’s
cameraman, Ashwini, was hit on the head and was injured.
However, in spite of these warnings we went ahead and reached
Police Commissioner’s office which was at a distance of
about 150 metres. Throughout this small distance we saw gutted
vehicles and horrible sights of torched shops which silently
narrate the story of the terrible but real situation there. Amar
Singh, seeing the words 'Sewa, Suraksha, Shanti’ (Service,
Security, Peace) on a notice-board in the Police
Commissioner’s office, asked him: ‘where are all these
things in Gujarat?’
It is 12 midnight now. People are awake throughout the city. They
are standing in groups at different places. Slogan-shouting is
going on. We are in Police Commissioner’s office. Reporters
and correspondents of different news agencies and newspapers are
also here. They are narrating their experiences of the day.
Slogans are also topic of conversation. The slogan that is
particularly being talked about is: ‘Jai Shri Ram, ho gaya
kaam' (Glory to Lord Ram: Job is done). (Translated from Urdu)
Aziz Burney, editor of the Rashtriya Sahara Urdu newspaper
published from Delhi and Lucknow, wrote this report from
Ahmedabad on 2 March.
The Milli Gazette, March 16-31, 2002
From a non-Muslim friend in
Gujarat
I know you are worried and there is every reason to be worried
with what is happening in Gujarat. What you see on T.V. and hear
in the news does put us to shame.
Yesterday, and today we, a group of organizations went around to
see what we can do in the sensitive and affected areas. You will
not believe but what I saw was horrible and terrifying. I can not
just believe that some human beings can be so cruel and some
human beings can be treated like that. Men, women and children
have been just burned, raped, acid and petrol poured on their
bodies, injured patients have no access to doctors or hospitals,
people are full of fears and can not get out of their colony,
some are hungry and nothing to eat, there is no police protection
and police themselves have shot people and supported the
attacking mobs. Some places where the entire Muslim colony is
raised to grounds, their holy places have been destroyed and are
replaced by other temples, roads are blocked, all things are made
impossible for the Muslims. The Muslim community is absolutely
destroyed and cornered in every sense. Every economic
establishment is ruined and it will take years to regain. There
are thousands of people taking shelter in Dargahs and Mosques and
what we see there is absolutely unbelievable, hearing their
stories raises every hair on our bodies and tears in our eyes.
There is overflow of anger and helplessness too. The community
absolutely feels deserted by all - the politicians, the state,
the police etc... there are very few whom they can trust.... they
can not even claim the dead bodies of their dear and near ones
and some have no access to them! What a situation!
Just on our way, one patrika is inserted in our car by a Hindu
group of young people which says in detail to cut every relations
with Muslims..not to buy or sell anything to/from Muslims, not to
employ, not to accommodate them in any way... terrible!
At times I feel less we talk better it is! Only pray that some
good sense prevail among the attackers in the future and let us
see what little that we can do.... Now we have a meeting in
Gandhi Ashram to discuss the future strategy. Let us see what
steps this group plans.
In general now things are under control and situation is
improving, getting back to normal in the city.
with terrible shock...
The Milli Gazette, March 16-31, 2002
Thousands of human torches amid
encircling darkness in Gujarat
By Syed Shahabuddin
The Muslims in Gujarat have been living in a state of siege but
no one could have imagined the fate, which befell them since the
last week of February. Thousands of human torches have spelled
‘darkness at noon’ for Gujarat.
In broad daylight, innocent men, women and children were burnt
like logs of wood, in the land of Gandhi, in their land of the
birth, with the world as the witness, only because they profess
Islam or because they bear a Muslim name or look like Muslims.
This is but regression to the jungle, not to pre-history because
the pre-historic man was not so brutal to his own kind.
In a world where we speak of Constitutions and legal systems, of
justice, equality and fraternity, of the world shrinking into a
global village of mankind forming one family, where we propagate
non-violence and compassion, where we commit ourselves to respect
for human rights, it is indeed a matter of shame for all of us.
But coming back to the persecuted community, which, in the words
of eminent scholar Mushirul Hasan, is "trapped in a world
that is clearly not their own. Strangers in the land they have
inhabited for centuries, nobody responds to their cries or comes
to rescue them from the rampaging mobs, lonely, isolated and
vulnerable".
This is not the first massacre in Gujarat; it happened in 1969
and again in 1985. But there is a difference. Never before did a
State Chief Minister repeatedly justify the massacres as a
‘natural reaction’ in this case, to the Godhra tragedy.
Never before did a State Government give a free hand to the
saffron brigade to organize killings, arson and looting on such a
massive scale for 48 hours. Never before did the administration
itself defend the role of the police force as spectators because
they also have ‘emotions’. Never before did the Central
Government take so long to deploy the army. Never before did the
State Government make it as difficult as it could to the Army to
do its duty.
Chief Minister Modi could well have anticipated the reaction to
the Godhra killings and taken effective preemptive and preventive
measures. He did not. He says he gave shoot-at-sight order to the
police force. But one would like to know how many rioters fell to
its bullets. His motive is clear. That some Muslims should have
the audacity to attack the holy warriors of Hindutva in the first
(and now the only) State of Hindu Rashtra, presided over by a
leading light of the Sangh Parivar, cannot go unpunished and the
entire community has to pay for it. This is nothing but criminal
negligence. No, it is worse than that. It is a crime against the
nation; a crime against humanity. Modi has no right to be the
Chief Minister. He must be dismissed; he should be prosecuted and
the State should be placed under President’s rule.
Anti-Muslim Massacres of Gujarat are, in a sense, the repeat of
the anti-Sikh massacres of Delhi. Both were motivated to punish a
community for the sins of a few misguided members. Both were
willed and then justified by the political masters of the day,
who gave a free hand to the marauding mobs; in both members of
the ruling party were leading and guiding the killers and
arsonists. Neither were riots in the sense of confrontation
between the two communities. In Delhi, there were no records of
Sikh mobs attacking the Hindus or their localities. In Gujarat,
there are no cases of Muslim mobs attacking Hindu localities,
they were both one-sided pogroms with the collusion of the State.
Both were thus patently cases of State Terrorism and not of
inter-communal violence.
And yet, the Prime Minister has no tears to shed. He is only
apprehensive of the country’s image abroad being tarnished.
He does not see the moral point; he does not press the ethical
issue; he does not perceive the nefarious role of his ideological
brother, the Chief Minister; he has not a word of sympathy for
the victims. Perhaps, like other bigwigs of the RSS, he sees the
Muslim Indians, all of them, as anti-national, Pakistan’s
fifth columnists, actual or potential collaborators of the ISI
and, therefore, entirely unworthy of human sympathy. He makes
formal appeals for peace and communal harmony but refrains from
using the power, the people of India have given him, to stop the
devil dance and to curb the killers.
Unfortunately, our country has seen so much violence, that as a
people we have become insensitive to human suffering; our psyche
has been benumbed. Through education and media we have created
the ‘other’, the historic adversary, to hate, to
deprive, to humiliate, to balance the supposed ‘account of
the centuries’. That is why sub-consciously the Hindu mind
accepts such ‘punishments’ to the Muslims as the
natural order of things with its deep sense of continuity of time
and life, so that successive generations form a continuum. This
explains why even the sadhus, sants and shakaracharyas of the
Hindu Samaj hardly ever taken notice of man assaulting man while
they show so much compassion towards animals and even insects!
Over the last decades, as Gujarat has prospered it has also been
polarized on communal lines. It is a strange phenomenon, all over
the country, that education and development have both contributed
to the communalization of the society. Today the rising Hindu
middle class, not the Hindu masses, are the standard bearers of
the Hindutva ideology, partly because the Jan Sangh and its later
incarnation the Bharatiya Janata Party targeted them. Perhaps
with money and education came the vicious political consciousness
that the country belongs to the Hindus, that Hindu dominance must
prevail over the non-Hindus, that the Hindu personality of the
nation must be projected, that, in contradistinction to Pakistan,
India should be a Hindu State. Perhaps the Muslim Gujarati was
seen as an unwanted competitor in the economic field. This
explains why since the 80’s the Hindu mobs have been led not
by the goondas, the lumpen elements, but by men and women,
educated professionals of the emergent middle class. That also
explains why the Hindu mobs have looted and burnt Muslim
commercial establishments, industrial units, hotels and
restaurants, apart from Masjids and Mazars to cripple the Muslim
community. It is not surprising that members of the Muslim elite
have been selectively targeted. It is genocide and economicide
rolled into one.
In a segmented society like ours, democracy tends to strengthen
the dividing line between groups, religion, caste, linguistic,
ethnic, because the electoral system caters to formation of
combinations, which struggle for supremacy and power. If the
electorate is polarized on communal lines, Hindu majoriatrianism
will prevail. This will obviously benefit the high castes who
occupy an established position in society, at the cost of the
religious minorities as well as the low castes, tribals, the
dalits etc. in Gujarat Muslims were never in the power game; only
occasionally, by the grace of the ruling party, a few became
MLA’s or MP’s were elected. As far as one can recall,
after 1977, when the late lamented and brutally torched Ahsan
Jaffery was elected to the Lok Sabha, there has been no Muslim
MP. In the Rajya Sabha, there have been a few. But largely they
keep on the right side of the system, strictly avoiding
‘communal issues’. Apart from under-representation the
other consequence is that even a national party like the
Congress, committed to secularism, has to cater to Hindu
sentiments. In supporting even genuine Muslim or Christian
grievances or raising humanitarian question, it will carefully
test the waters, lest it alienates the prevailing Hindu
sentiments and thus gives advantage to the BJP.
Today, Muslims are getting so disenchanted with the political
system that some are mentally prepared even for
self-disenfranchisement or boycott of elections, though any such
tendencies can only help the Hindu communal forces.
But the fact remains that even in time of distress, the secular
parties are not prepared to give a political fight to the Sangh
Parivar. All they do is to make statements and at election time
make common cause with the caste groups, disgruntled with the BJP
dispensation.
No one knows what actually happened in Godhra. Only the judicial
inquiry may bring out the truth. It appears to have been a
mindless outburst of the poor Muslims, living and working in the
neighbourhood of the railway track, after continuous needling and
humiliation by the karsevaks for many days. Whatever the
provocation, there can be no justification for deliberate
killing. But how can the Godhra killing justify what happened all
over Gujarat in the next five days? Anyway, the BJP slogans of
‘riot-free society’ and a ‘society without
fear’ have lost all meaning and credibility.
To anyone who has followed the march of the devil across the
country during the last 50 years, ‘Gujarat 2002’ is all
déjà vu. Every episode, every story, has its parallel in the
past. But there is a certain cold-blooded calculation, a
systematic organization to mark out the area of operation in
advance, a conspirational collusion on the part of the
administration and the police, a ruthless nod, a clear wink from
the powers that be, which makes Gujarat unique.
And the utter helplessness of the target groups, whether Muslims
or Christians or tribals. The nation is too big, the country too
large, to shame our conscience into action. Gujarats will come
and go. Soon everything will be forgotten. Life will resume its
dreary course. Some will gloat over their exploits. Some will
learn to camouflage, to disguise themselves, change their names,
dress, hair style, to avoid detection and remain alive in times
of trouble; some will seek safety in ghettos; some may simply
live on as alienated, rootless beings; some may turn bitter and
nurse revenge.
The ‘Gujarat 2002’, with thousands of human torches
turned into ashes, is a small event, as compared to Ahmedabad
1969, Nellie 1983 or Bhagalpur 1989, but thanks to TV coverage,
it has shocked the world into realization that behind our
development and progress lurk the demons of destruction. Can
these demons be exorcised? That is the question. It looks they
cannot be, because the Sangh Parivar has succeeded, through 75
years of ceaseless and zealous endeavour, to redefine Hinduism,
remake Hindu personality, indeed, to redefine the Indian society,
the Indian State and the Indian Culture.
Indian Nationalism stands already transformed into Hindu
Nationalism. Indian Secularism is being transformed before our
eyes into Hindu Secularism. Will Muslim Indians learn to live as
a ‘protected species’ in Hindu India?
The Milli Gazette, March 16-31, 2002
Unanswered question: If the train
fire was pre-planned, why only one bogey was torched?
Godhra: If the Godhra train fire incident was a pre-planned
conspiracy, as alleged by some, why only one bogey of the
Sabarmati Express was set on fire? Further, if this was an attack
on karsewaks, there were many more of them in several other
adjoining compartments. Why those were not torched?
A senior officer of Godhra railway station said, on condition of
anonymity, that for about a week before this train tragedy the
karsevaks travelling to and from Ayodhya by Sabarmati Express
were indulging in rowdyism and misbehaviour with vendors at
Godhra station. Even the RPF and GRP men, fearing untoward
incidents involving the karsewaks and vendors ordered these
vendors to temporarily suspend their business at the time of the
arrival of Sabarmati Express. But on the fateful day this train,
which normally arrives around midnight at Godhra, was very late
and arrived around 07.30 am. All the vending shops were open at
that time because many other trains also arrive during those
hours and hence this incident.
Many of these vendors belong to ‘Ghanchi’ tribe who
live in nearby settlements. When there was a war of words between
these vendors and karsewaks, they went back to their settlements
and, spreading the rumour that they had been attacked by
karsewaks excited their youth to reach the outer signal to take
revenge against these sewaks. Meanwhile, some mischievous
elements raised provocative and religious slogans from a mosque
in the railway compound and incited Ghanchi youths to take
revenge against these karsewaks. The Ghanchis, who are totally
illiterate and indulge in crime, first attacked a nearby petrol
pump, filled their utensils with petrol and diesel, reached the
outer signal where the train was stopped. Here they set fire to
coach No S 6.
According to these sources, when there were skirmishes between
the Ramsewaks and Ghanchi vendors at the station, these vendors
before retreating to their settlements had threatened the
karsewaks to settle the score later. Fearing any violent reaction
from these vendors, the Ramsewaks took precautions and closed all
the doors and windows of their compartments. The result was that
most of them were safe while innocents, mostly women and
children, became victims of the fire. No preplanning was involved
in this incident. Local Congress MLA Rajender Patel says that
this incident would never have taken place had the karsewaks not
misbehaved with the vendors. Kalota, the main accused in this
case enjoys BJP patronage since 1994, Patel alleged.
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