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 Ahmedabad, 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 the 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
organized 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 fetus
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 everywhere 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. Everyone spoke of the pillage
and plunder, being organized 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 coordinating
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 supervisors before they organized the
decisive use of force to prevent the brutal escalation of violence, and to
protect vulnerable women and children from the organized, 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 Ashram 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 organizations. 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, organize 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, 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, IAS
On deputation with "Action Aid"
March 17, 2002
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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. 