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AHMEDABAD, March 12: Twenty-five-year-old mother Najma Begum Ayub, one of thousands of people housed in Muslim relief camps in Gujarat, cannot forget the sight of her children being burned alive by a Hindu mob.
“What I saw was so ghastly that I can never go back to my home,” Ayub said, clinging to one of her two surviving daughters. “The Hindu mob was frying little children alive like chicken. I saw my son and daughter burning in front of my eyes.”
Thousands of Muslims in Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat, are crowded into stinking relief camps rather than risk returning to areas targeted by Hindu mobs almost two weeks ago.
Gujarat’s terrified Muslims fear a prayer ceremony planned for Friday by Hindu hardliners in the northern town of Ayodhya could prove the next flashpoint for violence.
“Muslims are all worried about March 15. We don’t know what new history will be created by the Hindus,” said M. R. Qasmi, a committee member at the Sundram Nagar camp housing 4,000 people.
The Supreme Court is to rule on Wednesday on whether Hindus can hold ritual prayers on Friday in Ayodhya, where hardliners want to build a temple on the site of a razed mosque. The mosque’s destruction in 1992 by Hindu zealots triggered sectarian riots in which more than 3,000 people died.
It was an attack by a Muslim mob on a train packed with Hindu activists returning from Ayodhya on February 27 — in which 58 people died — that sparked the latest Hindu reprisals, which claimed some 650 victims.
Ayub said she hid behind a pile of bodies to survive.
“We were trapped in a narrow lane between two groups of Hindus who bathed us in petrol. My clothes were also on fire but I tore them off and hid behind a huge pile of bodies,” she said, showing burn marks on her back and arms.
Though her house was gutted, she escaped the carnage in the Naroda Pattia area where nearly 100 people died on a single day.
“So many young Muslim women were raped by Hindu men before being set on fire. I’m scared to live in any area with Hindus,” said Ayub, in the Shah Alam Mosque, serving as a makeshift camp.
ANGER AGAINST AUTHORITIES: Throughout Ahmedabad, the blackened shells of Muslim shops, hotels and homes stand as stark reminders of the violence.
The relief camps, on open ground, in schools and mosques, have an overpowering stench due to a lack of sanitation and are packed with Muslims left homeless or too scared to return home.
Ahmedabad city officials say 48,000 people are housed in 45 relief camps. Voluntary groups put the figure at 60,000.
The anger against the authorities is palpable.
In the Bapunagar camp, where 8,000 Muslims have barely enough space to stand, deputy collector A.V. Zala had a difficult time pacifying them.
“Their anger is justified. But now their problems will be solved,” he said, promising to provide supplies.
In camp after camp, Muslims recounted horrifying experiences in which family members died in rioting and police firing.
“No one wants to go back to their homes even if they’re still intact. There’s an awful atmosphere of terror among the Muslims. People are terrified of the police also who targeted and shot Muslims,” said Qasmi.
Witnesses said police did nothing to stop the mobs.
Police deny the accusations. “In a riot where Hindus and Muslims are fighting each other, the bullet does not know who it hits,” joint commissioner of police M. K. Tandon told Reuters.
Ahmedabad’s police commissioner P.C. Pande sparked fierce criticism when he admitted earlier this month that the city’s mainly-Hindu police force “were not insulated from the general social milieu”.
The authorities ultimately brought in the army to quell the violence and said they did everything possibly to stop the mobs.
The hardline Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), whose activists died in the train attack, said Muslims should not live in fear.
“The killing and burning of Muslims in the riots was a reaction to the train incident in which innocent Hindus were burned,” said Jaideep Patel, of the VHP’s Gujarat unit. “If the Muslims live in peace then there will be no more reaction from the Hindu community. We want peace,” he said.—Reuters
