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NEW DELHI, Feb 27: Amnesty International criticized the western Indian state of Gujarat on the first anniversary on Thursday of a major massacre, for what it described as severe bias against Muslims.
“Constitutional rights, and in particular the right to redress, continue to be violated in the state,” the London-based organization said in a statement to mark the Feb 27 massacre in the city of Godhra.
Some 2,000 people — most of them Muslims — were killed in the months of violence, with the state administration accused of turning a blind or even sympathetic eye to vigilante attacks by Hindus.
“The manner in which police investigations into the massacres are carried out highlights a severe bias against Muslim victims and survivors,” Amnesty said.
It stressed that “justice must be promptly delivered to the victims and their families, if the credibility of the criminal justice system in the country is to be upheld.
“The absence of an independent investigative agency prejudices most trials even before they begin. It flouts a very basic principle of justice: the same police officers cannot be the accused and investigators at the same time.
ANNIVERSARY OBSERVED: Hindu hardliners prayed together here on Thursday one year after a train attack that set off communal killings, using the anniversary to step up a campaign to build a controversial temple over the ruins of the Babri mosque.
But there was no visible increase in security in Gujarat state on the sensitive anniversary, and police said there were no incidents of violence.
Praveen Togadia, the firebrand leader of the right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), visited the ruins of the train in Godhra town which was torched a year ago by a mob, killing 58 people.
“We pledge that Godhra will not be repeated,” Mr Togadia said later at a rally in Ahmedabad, the state’s commercial capital.
“We’re creating a situation in Gujarat by which no one will dare attack Hindus again.”
Within hours of last year’s attack, mobs rampaged the streets across the Gujarat, the largest state ruled by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Hindu nationalist BJP party.
Some 2,000 people — most of them Muslims — were killed in the months of violence, with the state administration accused of turning a blind or even sympathetic eye to vigilante attacks by Hindus.
Many of those killed at Godhra were on their way back from the northern town of Ayodhya, where Hindu zealots in 1992 tore down the 16th-century Babri mosque.
“Those who died at Godhra had not gone to Ayodhya to earn money but had gone for their religion, so they have attained martyrdom,” Togadia said.
At VHP functions across the state, activists “took vows not to let the sacrifices of the Godhra victims go to waste and to fight until the end for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya”, said Jaydeep Patel, the group’s general secretary in Ahmedabad.
The VHP and other Hindu militants want the Indian government to hand over 27 hectares of land around the Babri mosque ruins — currently out-of-bounds to all — to build the temple.
Opposition parties fear such a move would be explosive.
For the past year the Hindu right has frequently cited the Godhra attack in political campaigns. The BJP swept to re-election in Gujarat assembly elections in December with a slogan of “Hindutva”, or “the Hindu way of life”. —AFP
