Here Is The Real Face Of Hinduism

[Guest SatwantBeantKehar]

Gujarat riots were coordinated

By xyz 21/03/2002 At 06:54

Reflections on the Gujarat massacre By Harsh Mander

(the writer, is a serving IAS Officer (Formerly Head of Lal Bahadur

Shastri IAS Academy , who is now working on deputation with a development organisation)

Reflections on the Gujarat massacre

By

Harsh Mander

(the writer, is a serving IAS Officer (Formerly Head of Lal Bahadur

Shastri IAS Academy , who is now 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 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.

[Guest PRITAM SINGH KHALSA]

:<Edited>: :'( :bringitondude

[Akhoza]

Gujurat riots were terrible but they didnt get alot of coverage on the news i think prob due to 11/09/01

[LifeIsBeautiful]

Man, I am tired of this board, all day long you people bash muslims or hindus all day long. Look at the last couple of threads in the past couple of weeks, either their how Islam is evil or how Hindusim is out to destroy Sikhism.

Grow up, stop posting anti-hindu news or anti-muslim stuff. Lets just talk about Sikhi.

[Guest PRITAM SINGH KHALSA]

Man, I am tired of this board

Then go to sleep :D

[wjkk wjkf]

I'm afraid it's a fact of life that these kinda things are related to Sikhi in some way...so we should deal with it and not turn the other cheak...These things happen and they can decide yours, mine and everyone's future in Sikhi...Look at whats goin on in the UK, Muslim women are having trouble with wearing the niqab, what makes you think that tomorrow they won't turn around and say, "What's the point in a turban and long hair? Doesnt help you in any way" Its the same in almost everything.

[Revolutionary]

1 criticism: Why write Hinduism?

Why not Indian Racists?

Its same as calling every white racist person a christian.

That title itself has brought the credibility of this article down low.

[wjkk wjkf]

Yeh but sometimes that sorta distorts the truth...i.e. when you say Indian you could mean Muslims and I'm pretty sure that Muslims weren't killing eachother in this massacre...I think a heck of a lot of the evidence points towards Hindus here and during the anti-sikh pogroms.

[Guest Papi]

NO not HINDUS, jus a small number of fanatics.

fanatics have no religion.

[wjkk wjkf]

LOL: good point, but their religion on paper is Hindu! lol