Syeda Mazhar
The ruthless butchering of Muslims in India is not a new phenomenon. Violations of human rights and especially the rights of the minorities are so prevalent in today’s India that the people are now numb to it. Be it rape crimes or dowry issues or even female infanticide, the crime rate is increasingly accelerating. In 2002, a Hindu Muslim conflict arose under the rule of the now Prime Minister Narendra Modi which caused the death of hundreds of Muslims and vicious atrocities unleashed upon them. The sources also absolved that the state police and government of any collusion in the violence also left 200,000 people homeless. Hindu nationalist Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, was widely accused of turning a blind eye to the violence.
A man with massacre on his hands has been appointed as the Prime Minister of India. He is infamous for allowing the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat and not only did He turned a deaf ear to the pleas of the Muslims against the violence but is reported to have prohibited the policemen to stay out of the spreading ferocity. After the elections Modi bore a vague apology for the orgy of killings and rape of Muslims in Gujarat. Modi has always denied any wrong doings but he advocated that the angry Hindus had the right ‘vent their anger’. He is also alleged to have, in a meeting in the night before the riots, told officials that the Muslim community needed to be taught a lesson following an attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims.
However, the riots tarred Modi’s international image, leading him to be blacklisted for a decade by the United States and the European Union. Given the enormity of the allegations against Modi, the apology he provided was frankly pathetic, indicative of the lack of sensitivity towards the plights of the Muslims in Gujarat.
Looking at the carnage of 2002, a train coach carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire in Godhra station in Gujarat. Fifty-eight people died. Within hours and without a shred of evidence, Modi declared that the Pakistani secret services had been to blame; he then had the charred bodies paraded in the main city of Ahmedabad; and let his own party support a state-wide strike for three days. What followed was mass bloodshed: 1,000 dead on official estimates, more than 2,000 by independent tallies.
The vast majority of those who died were Muslim. Mobs of men dragged women and young girls out of their homes and raped them. According to Kalpana Kannabiran, the rapes were part of a well-organized, deliberate and pre-planned strategy, and that this puts the violence in the area of a political pogrom and genocide. Other acts of violence against women were acid attacks, beatings and the killing of women who were pregnant. Children were also killed in front of their parents
Coordinated attacks against the Muslims community began on 28 February, the day following the burning of the train. These were carried out by men wearing saffron robes and khaki shorts, who drove to the sites of violence in large numbers in trucks. They used swords, explosives and gas cylinders to destroy homes and places of business. The attacks were made in full view of police stations and police officers; however, the police did not intervene.
In the aftermath of the violence, it became clear that many attacks were focused not only on Muslim populations, but on Muslim women and children. Organizations such as Human Rights Watch criticized the Indian government and the Gujarat state administration for failure to address the resulting humanitarian condition of the people, the “overwhelming majority of them Muslim,” who fled their homes for relief camps in the result of the events. According to Teesta Setalvad on 28 February in the districts of Morjari Chowk and Charodia Chowk, in Ahmedabad of forty people killed by police shooting, all were Muslim. An international fact-finding committee formed of all women international experts from US, UK, France, Germany and Sri Lanka reported, “sexual violence was being used as a strategy for terrorising women belonging to minority community in the state.”
The much publicized reflection of Modi as a perpetrator of Gujarat riots hides an inconvenient truth. Modi was not alone. He was backed up by big industrialists and businessmen of India, not to mention his association with the Hindu extremist party BJP. No single person can cause riots on this scale alone. The continuous noises made by media over his role in Gujarat riot tends to put other leaders and perpetrators of riots away from the spotlight.
The media cacophony is so blatant, shrill and loud that it polarizes the opinion of all to either pro-Modi or anti-Modi whereas BJP and other religious extremist parties played a very big role in inciting the Hindu population and encouraging them to ‘get revenge’ from the Muslims residing in Gujarat. A very bitter truth is the fact that no judicial committee has been able to definitely prove any link between Modi and the riots.
Modi along with the then government of India basically exonerated Pakistan for causing such act of terrorism without any proof. Although, doubts have been cast and a reevaluation is awaited, the atrocities against the muslims has always been something the world protested on but to no avail.
