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Reflections on the Gujarat massacre

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Reflections on the Gujarat massacre
Anonymous
03/18/02 at 14:21:44
CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY

Reflections on the Gujarat massacre
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
is 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 superivisors 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
are 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 is 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 defenceless 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
foodgrain 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, tolerance.
There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me.
One of them is a song I often sang with pride and conviction. The words
of the song
are:
Sare jahan se achha
Hindustan hamara...
It is a song I will never be able to sing again.
(Harsh Mander, the writer, is a serving IAS Officer, who is working on
deputation with a development organisation)


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