AHMEDABAD: The house where Ehsan Jaffri, a former member of India's parliament, was burned to death with 38 fellow Muslims is empty and blackened. Doors and windows hang open.
Outside on the street, Hindu shopkeepers do a thriving trade in televisions and videos, oblivious to the burned-out walled compound where the 76-year-old Jaffri and dozens of families lived until religious riots swept Gujarat state in 2002.
The riots, in which human rights groups say about 2,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims, are being largely ignored as India gears up for general elections this month. Talk of the Hindu-Muslim tension that has shaped Indian politics for years has been most striking by its absence.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose chief minister in Gujarat returned to power in a landslide a few months after the bloodshed on an unabashed pro-Hindu campaign, is now promoting peace and prosperity to keep power nationally.
In trying to stake claim to the middle ground, the Hindu nationalist BJP has even attracted Muslims in some parts of the country in the run-up to the polls. In Gujarat, though, where unspeakable acts of savagery were committed against the community, the scars run deep.
Hindu mobs went on a rampage of revenge across the western state after a suspected Muslim crowd burned to death 59 Hindu pilgrims, including women and children, in an attack on a train in February 2002.
Critics and rights activists accused the BJP of turning a blind eye to the bloodshed. "It is very troubling that after two years, there is no remorse for what happened," said J.S. Bandukwala, a nuclear physicist whose house was among the thousands of Muslim homes and businesses destroyed.
"When something horrible happens, a stage does come when people start feeling sorry: Japan vis-a-vis the Chinese, the Germans and the Jews, but here it is as if we don't exist."
Muslims, who make up nine per cent of Gujarat's 50 million people, have been pushed deeper into ghettos across one of India's richest states - bitter, helpless and marginalized.
But for Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's BJP-led coalition, forecast to return to power comfortably in the elections starting on April 20, it is time to move on. "What has happened has happened, we have to get on," said Vadibhai Patel, a former BJP state minister.
"The issue is development, people are concerned about water, 24 hours electricity," he said on the sidelines of a campaign rally festooned with banners and posters of a "Shining India".
GHETTOS: None of the residents of Jaffri's Gulbarg residential quarter in the middle of a Hindu neighbourhood in the state's largest city, Ahmedabad, has returned.
A few policemen hang around in a compound strewn with leaves. A burned shoe lies on the ground and a bicycle is tethered to the rear gate of a blackened house. There is nothing left in the houses, which were either ransacked when a 2,000-strong mob armed with swords and petrol bombs set upon the complex or cleared later by the few survivors.
"It is too painful for a lot of people to live again in these houses," said Ali Noor Mansoor, who lost 19 relatives, including his 70-year-old mother, in the attack. "Those images of burning, women and children screaming for help keep coming back," said Mansoor, who runs a mattress shop.
Survivors have moved into Muslim enclaves of Ahmedabad, a gritty city of nine million that bore the brunt of India's worst communal violence in a decade. Some want to sell their homes, others like Mansoor are biding their time.
Achyut Yagnik who teaches at Gujarat University says Ahmedabad has become a segregated city. "You won't find a single Muslim home within a five-kilometre radius of where we are sitting," he said.
Muslim doctors, lawyers and government employees have stayed on in Juhapura, the city's largest Muslim ghetto where many sought shelter during the carnage.Across the road are Hindu homes with barbed wire fences and high brick walls topped with jagged shards of glass: it is as though the Muslims of Juhapura and Hindus in the adjacent neighbourhoods live in separate countries.
And in Naroda Patiya, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, where at least 91 people, most of them women and children, were killed, masons are racing to get a new school ready deep in a Muslim enclave by the time the summer holiday ends.
For now, children have to cross through a Hindu neighbourhood to get to school. Most families here live in such fear that even a firework to mark an Indian cricket victory over Pakistan can be mistaken for trouble.
Abdul Hamid Akbar, an activist with the Islamic Relief Committee involved in rehabilitation work across the state, said one of the first things people wanted after the massacre in Naroda was a school close to their homes.
"Everyone had questions. Are our children safe in the school? Are the roads safe? Will we find them at the end of the day?" he recalled. "We decided it was better to take precautions." -Reuters
