Darkness
And Light In Modern India
By Harsh Mander
16 April, 2004
Punjab Pro
Usman
Shaikh was one among a few hundred young women and men who volunteered
to work as aman pathiks (or peace workers) in the wake of the blood-drenched
carnage of the spring of 2002 in Gujarat. Uprooted from his native Ahmedabad,
Usman tirelessly shuttles between the ravaged and traumatised villages
of rural Godhra allocated to his charge. Together with the other aman
pathiks, he strives to rebuild the brutally ruptured bonds of trust
and harmony between the two profoundly estranged communities. I asked
him once whether he missed the loved members of his family in the long
weeks that he is separated from them every month. He replied, Since
1969, my home has been looted and destroyed five times in communal riots.
I am working so that it is not destroyed a sixth time.
The carnage that
convulsed the state of Gujarat has left in its wake a profound human
tragedy that does not heal or abate. The agony of Gujarat, its blood-drenched
humanity soaked in ideologies of hatred and divide, has hurtled the
people of our vast country into a defining crossroads. The manner in
which they respond today will determine the kind of country and world
that we leave behind for our children. At stake is the affirmation of
justice, our pluralist heritage, indeed our very survival as a people
who care, and a polity that is genuinely democratic and humane.
During the Indias
long struggle for freedom from British colonial rule, a groundswell
of popular support and mass mobilisation gathered behind Mahatma Gandhi,
and it shared his vision of a resolutely secular nation, with freedom
and equal rights of citizenship for people of every faith, community,
caste, class, colour and gender. There was also influential mass support
for more radically egalitarian and democratic ideologies of the left
and dalit movements. However, psuedo-religious extremist leaders fought
for and secured an independent Islamic nation carved out from Muslim
majority segments of India. Extremist Hindu organisations were implacably
opposed to Gandhis humane and inclusive Hinduism and nationalism,
and one among their ranks assassinated him just months after India became
free. The constitution of India, drafted by one of Indias most
revered leaders from a community, which traditionally was subjected
to the most savage caste discrimination, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, established
the secular, socialist and democratic foundations of the new nation.
However, psuedo-religious
extremist organisations continue to challenge this vision of India,
more aggressively since the 1980s. Their mobilisation is organised most
powerfully around the symbol of a medieval mosque, the Babri Masjid,
which they claim had been constructed after demolishing a temple built
to commemorate the birth-place of revered Hindu deity Ram. A massive
mob assault on this Muslim place of worship in the sacred Hindu town
of Ayodhya resulted in its brutish demolition in 1992. As the highest
courts of the land attempt to arbitrate the rival claims to the disputed
site, extremist Hindu organisations continue to demand that the site
be handed over for the construction of the Ram temple regardless of
the decision of the courts, or independent historical evidence.
Several mass campaigns
for converging on the incendiary disputed site vacated by the demolished
Babri mosque have been organised over the years by fundamentalist Hindu
organizations, more vigorously in the run-up to periodic elections,
continuously smouldering and fanning sectarian passions. A train-load
of activists of these organisations were returning to Gujarat from this
contested site at Ayodhya following one of a long series of such campaigns,
on the fateful day February 27, 2002. At the railway station in a small
town called Godhra in Gujarat, a railway compartment of a passenger
train was set afire, resulting in the horrific death by burning alive
of 58 people, many of them women and children. It was widely and influentially
propagated that the merciless arson was organised by a mob of Muslim
people living close to the railway station. This was used potently as
an instrument to explode prejudice and hatred against the entire population
of Muslim people living in Godhra, Gujarat and indeed everywhere in
India, and to justify their slaughter and rape and subsequent socio-economic
boycott all across Gujarat. However, later forensic investigation has
led many human rights activists to contest this version of the source
of the fire in the ill-fated train compartment of the Sabarmati Express
at Godhra.
Within hours of
the burning of the train, cities, towns and villages across the state
of Gujarat were convulsed simultaneously by mass violence of a scale
and brutality rarely seen in modern India. Gujarat, the industrialised
prosperous province in the west of India, was tormented by one of the
most barbarous and gruesome episodes of ethnic blood-letting, compared
to the many that have scarred the country since the trauma of its Partition
more than half a century earlier. This resulted in the gruesome slaughter,
often by burning alive, of an estimated 2000 men, women and children,
and mass rapes and killings including of young girls. More than two
hundred thousand people were rendered destitute, their homes and livelihoods
plundered and destroyed. They took refuge in makeshift relief camps
that came up across the state of Gujarat. There followed widely shared
national outrage and anguish, about the enormity of mass brutality which
was substantially targeted at women and children from the minority Muslim
community, and the role of the state authorities who enabled or actively
abetted the planned massacre and destruction.
Among the aching
images that I have described in this volume, and will carry in my heart
throughout my life, is of a small boy of six in the Juhapara relief
camp in Ahmedabad, his eye gashed, his head wrapped in blood-soaked
bandages, who described to me in agonising detail as I held him in my
lap, how his father, mother and six brothers and sisters were battered
to death before his eyes. My heart was repeatedly lacerated as I heard
the gut-wrenching testimonies 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. A broken old man, insane
with grief, who lost his entire family, shared with me the story of
his life, wondering why he was still alive. An escaping family, 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.
In no sectarian
conflict in recent Indian history, has there been such extensive and
organised sexual brutality, targeting women and young girls with mass
rape and burning alive. The use of Muslim womens bodies as battlefields,
to avenge, subjugate and even eliminate, an entire community, has strong
echoes of Bosnia, where also rape was widely used by the state and military
apparatus, as a strategy of ethnocide.
The unconscionable
failures and active connivance of the state police and administrative
machinery is now widely acknowledged. The aching sickness in my soul
has deepened further in the months that passed, as I observed with disbelief
the continuing silent annihilation of the devastated innocent survivors
through the unprecedented merciless subversion of all civilized norms
of relief and rehabilitation.
An entire body of
more than forty independent citizens reports, with an unwavering
fearless commitment to truth and justice, have gathered overwhelming
evidence of the enormity of the brutality, state complicity, long advance
preparations for the carnage and the deliberate abdication of responsibilities
for relief and rehabilitation. Those who spontaneously volunteered to
research and write these reports include several of the most respected
retired judges, activists, writers, school and university teachers,
lawyers, doctors, trade unionists and retired civil servants in the
country, women and men of unimpeachable integrity and social conscience.
Collectively these reports, with masses of hard evidence and heart-wrenching
testimonies, piece together what builds into unassailable affirmation
of one of the gravest mass crimes in Indias recent history.
The majority of
citizens groups reports elaborate exhaustively the harrowing details
of the savagery. Beyond a few pages, it is hard to read, even less imagine
or reconcile with evidence of the abyss of bestiality and mass sadism
into which our people stooped. The report of the Concerned Citizens
Tribunal comprising retired senior judges of the Supreme Court, senior
advocates and activists, marshals evidence which shows how in
the macabre dance of death, human beings were quartered and the killing
protracted while the terrorised survivors looked on; the persons targeted
were dragged or paraded naked through the neighbourhood; victims were
urinated upon, before being finally cut to pieces and burnt. Hundreds
of testimonies before us show how this manner and method of killing
has left an indelible imprint on the minds of the survivors. It
notes that, the burning alive of victims was widespread.
Several citizens
groups reports have documented the deeply harrowing experiences
of the survivors of the carnage in the grim aftermath of carnage, particularly
because of the unconscionable and unprecedented refusal of state government
authority to establish relief camps, which were instead run by community
organisations; the forced premature closure of these camps; and niggardly
and arbitrary compensation. The denial of relief and rehabilitation
by the government of Gujarat is a harrowing, disgraceful tale of premeditated,
unrepentant and merciless perverse exercise of public authority. It
began in the immediate aftermath of the mass violence. Terrified survivors,
women, men, girls and boys, fled to the enclaves of safety that they
located, with only the clothes on their backs. These were mostly open
spaces in Muslim ghettoes of cities, towns and villages, places of worship,
schools, parks, sometimes graveyards. Initially, people slept under
the open sky. As the numbers continued to swell, to well over one hundred
thousand people in Ahmedabad alone and the same numbers in other parts
of the state, mostly spontaneous voluntary teams were organised for
the management of the camps. They mustered stockpiles of food supplies,
medicines, drinking water, facilities for sanitation, cooks, health
and sanitary workers.
Even as the weeks
and months elapsed, the state was almost nowhere visible amidst these
admirable but austere self-help efforts of the affected communities.
After around ten days the district administration began the supply to
camps of uncooked food rations, and occasional visits of medical teams
with supplies. In the two decades that I spent in the civil services,
I have never observed a single instance in earlier times in which it
was not the state which led relief operations after any major disaster
human-made or natural. The organisation of relief and rehabilitation
is central to the training and traditions of the civil services. In
the past, governments may have faltered in the outcomes of its programmes.
But Gujarat carnage of 2002 marks a sordid first in which civil service
functionaries consented to and co-operated with merciless political
dictates to completely abdicate responsibility for relief, and over
time even to thwart community efforts to provide shelter and succour
to the hapless survivors of the massacre.
The summer temperatures
were pitiless, and the mercury pushed to 45 degree centigrade, sometimes
higher. Life in the relief shelters became even harder - old people,
children and women listlessly sought shade under the tattered shamianas
or the few trees that dotted the graveyards and open grounds. The residents
of the camps were even more threatened with the arrival of the monsoons.
The camp organisers increasingly found themselves under intense official
pressure to close the camps. Starved of food supplies, some camps persisted
for two months or more with donations raised by voluntary organisations.
A very small number of camps continue to operate, but are without food
supplies. They were just primitive covered spaces that extend a bare
semblance of shelter to internal refugees with nowhere to go. The camps
gradually emptied as all except the most terrified or destitute residents
were thus forced to leave for their old damaged homes, or to live with
relatives within or outside the State. Or, dozens of people crowded
together, in small hired rooms in Muslim ghettoes.
The state government
has refused to rebuild the vandalised religious structures. The same
defiant abdication of responsibility for rehabilitation characterises
state actions as documented in various reports. The Concerned Citizens
Tribunal report estimates that, apart from the loss of about 2,000
lives, the destruction of businesses is worth at least Rs 3,800 crore.
The damage caused to private homes and agricultural properties of at
least 3,00,000 victims of Gujarat has not been computed. However,
not only has no comprehensive rehabilitation package been declared
even five months after the violence, no survey has been conducted. And
by its behaviour and action, the government has made it clear that it
wishes to have nothing to do with the physical and psychological rehabilitation
of its own people, the Muslims of Gujarat. The Tribunal notes
that the state government is abdicating its primary role as protector
and provider of all its citizenry.
Over a year and
a half has passed since Gujarat was devastated by the death-dealing
squall of hate that traumatised the nation, the state slipped off the
front pages of national newspapers. The widely shared assumption is
that after the stunning electoral endorsement, peace has been restored
to the ravaged state. A journey of healing that took us through tribal
regions that were the epicentre of the violence that had ripped apart
Gujarat, revealed to us the frightening anatomy of this utterly counterfeit
peace.
Authentic peace
can be founded ultimately only on justice, trust and dignity. In the
wake of blood-drenched betrayal and mass brutality, the construction
of an enduring peace required both the healing of remorse and compassion
and the demonstration of justice done. Neither was evident anywhere
during our harrowing travels. Instead, we witnessed twisted malformed
mutations of peace, based on a resigned social acceptance of settled
fear, utterly unequal imposed degrading compromises and the practice
of second-class citizenship.
The majority of
leaders of the marauding mobs, even when named in police complaints,
walk free, compounding the terror of the residents. Of 4252 cases registered
in the wake of the carnage, more than 2107 have already been closed
by investigation authorities, claiming lack of evidence. On the other
hand, even where the mass violence exclusively targeted the minorities,
as was the situation in an overwhelming number of cases, it is they
who are being arrested in legions under fabricated charges, including
under the draconian anti-terrorism law of POTA. Of the 240 cases registered
under POTA in Gujarat, 239 are against Muslims and one against a Sikh.
Frequently, as in both Naroda Patiya and Godhra, the peace-makers are
especially targeted for arrests, lawyers from the majority community
are unwilling to defend them and even the courts are reluctant to free
them on bail.
Gujarat has a proud
tradition of social movements, constructive organisations and trade
unions. Most of these did not even attempt to confront the demons of
brutality in the years when they were being nurtured, or in the dark
days when they broke loose. Few staked their lives to halt the death-dealing
throngs. Most are unwilling even to reach out and heal, amidst the torment
and destruction of what survives. They did not attempt to confront mobs
as they set aflame people and properties, they set up no camps to shelter
the bereaved and destitute survivors. They remain mute as all civilised
norms of relief and rehabilitation were openly and wantonly subverted
by the state. Their thin alibis of neutrality amount to
taking sides with injustice. The question that social organisations
elsewhere in the country need also to ponder is whether indeed they
would act differently if sectarian violence broke out tomorrow where
they work. And if they too would remain passive, then a whole tradition
that lays claim to progressive ideals of justice and caring, is in the
throes of an unprecedented crisis.
This crisis extend
also to most of the political class, barring the left. Even parties
built on the foundation of secular ideologies, at crucial moments of
our recent history, have displayed a singular lack of nerve, of the
courage of their convictions, and have floundered in the faint-hearted
calculus of vote-banks. It would be a historic betrayal if across the
political spectrum, practitioners of politics do not realize just how
much is at stake, and also that in the long-run, what is ethically right
is also politically sound. Opportunistic compromises, open or tacit,
with communal ideologies, may seem to secure immediate gains, but they
permanently erode and imperil the secular and humane foundations of
the polity.
Amidst the bleak
despair of this ignoble abdication, a few organisations bravely banded
together under banners like the Citizens Initiative in Ahmedabad.
Many others grappled with the even more daunting challenges of rural
communalism. Despite threats to the very survival of some of the organisations,
they refused to flinch from their resolute collective stand against
injustice.
The parched compassion
of Gujarat was quenched most of all by the stream of volunteers, mostly
young people, who continue to pour into Gujarat, eager to contribute
in whatever way they can, to show that they care, and suffer with their
fellow citizens in Gujarat. In this hour of national darkness, many
lamps were lit. With quiet individual acts of caring and courage, it
is ordinary people, in several corners of the country, who have defended
the gravely threatened humanism and democratic traditions of our land.
I have been most
touched by the aman pathiks or peace volunteers, mostly painfully young
men and women who responded to our call in Ahmedabad to work for healing
and rebuilding. Many of the volunteers had themselves suffered gravely
in the carnage. As they showed me pictures of the ruins of their burnt
and plundered homes, or spoke in low voices sometimes of the violence
suffered by members of their own families, I wondered how many of us
in their position would be able to summon the same inner resources to
forgive so quickly and cheerfully help others in need.
As we stumble in
the darkness and despair of this defining moment in our collective history,
it is the lamps of compassion, humanity and justice lit with resolution
and faith by our ordinary people that still illuminate our paths.