| (
The writer, is a serving IAS officer, is working on
deputation with a development organisation)
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
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
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 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.
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. Translation: Sare jahan
se achha Hindustan hamara ---our India is better than
the world--- |
