Crime Against Humanity
Volume 2 An inquiry into the carnage in Gujarat -- Findings And Recommendations by Concerned Citizens Tribunal -Gujarat 2002
Consequences
1. Alienation
2. Muslims as Second Class Citizens
3. Women
4. Children
5. Ghettoisation
6. Communalisation of Public Space
7. Impact on Education
8. Economic Decimation
9. Religious and Cultural Desecration
10. Minority Identity a Target
11. Forced Migration
12. Impact on Muslim minority in other states
13. Conservative Trends among Women
14. Arming of Civil Society
15. Hidden Agenda
16. Decline in India’s International Stature
17. Brutalisation of Women, Adivasis and Dalits
18. Attack on Akshardham
19. All is Not Lost
1.1 Hate speeches and the atrocities that follow against sections of our peopleare generating fissures and divisions in our society. Deep-rooted and seriousalienation is being caused by these hate campaigns against minorities in differ-ent parts of the country. As is evident especially in Kashmir, Muslims all overIndia are experiencing this alienation. In the absence of any concerted effort,on the part of government, central or state, to check growing hate politics andbrutal violence, it is difficult to see how the problem of alienation and its dam-aging consequences can be remedied. Among those engaged in this cynicalproject are the chief minister of Gujarat, Shri Narendra Modi, his ministerialteam, the Bajrang Dal and the VHP represented by people like Shri PraveenTogadia and Shri Ashok Singhal.
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1.2. The current practitioners of hate, preach and pursue the same philosophy thatcontributed to the tragic partition of the country in 1947. Having made impressiveorganisational gains since then and having spawned numerous affiliates — VHP,Bajrang Dal etc — the same forces are back to playing the same game. Through wordand deed they relentlessly send out the message that Muslims are not safe in thiscountry. The inevitable consequences are clear for everyone to see.
1.3. Apart from numerous instances of brutality and bestiality, and the sheerscale and magnitude of the malevolence, the Gujarat carnage is perhaps epitomisedby the fact that even High Court judges — one sitting, the other retired; bothMuslims – experienced deep insecurity and utter vulnerability at the time. Withthe government offering them no protection whatsoever, both had to flee theirhomes. The house of Justice Divecha (retired) was ransacked and partly destroyed.When the Tribunal met him in May, two months after the carnage, Justice Kadri,a member of the bench, did not feel safe enough to return to his official accommodation. This threat to the judiciary cannot be treated lightly. Every citizen isfully entitled to equal protection of law. But when judges are not safe, what ofthe common man?
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2.1. Reducing Muslims to the status of second-class citizens would appear to havebeen the central objective of the perpetrators of the carnage. Eight months after theviolence, the Muslim community in Gujarat continues to face terror and economicboycott. There is little hope of speedy justice being done. Many of the accused, al-most all the chief culprits, are out on bail. Evidence placed before the tribunal showedhow, in villages where people have dared to return, organised economic and socialboycott had reduced them to penury. This is the story in parts of Gandhinagar,Sabarkantha, Anand, Bharuch, Ankleshwar, Mehsana and Dahod districts as also inAhmedabad and Vadodara city. Tens of thousands have not been able to resumework because of the comprehensive economic crippling; even insurance claims havenot been met in many cases. Far from helping a badly bruised and battered commu-nity, with word and deed, Shri Modi’s government continues to gloat over their pre-dicament. This state of affairs calls for immediate intervention from every institutionof the state and civil society, not only in Gujarat but also from all over the country.
3.1. An issue that needs to be recognised and sensitively handled is the high numberof female-headed households, widows and victim-survivors of sexual violence. Spe-cial measures need to be taken for the material, emotional and psychological healingof this section.
4. Children4.1. There are at least 33,000 children and young persons who have faced attackson their own person or been eyewitness to most gruesome forms of violence beinginflicted on their near and dear ones. Both state and society must make consistentefforts to reach out to them so that the trauma that they have been inflicted with isdealt with in a humane fashion and does not become the cause of growing alienation.
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5.1. Cities of Gujarat, especially Ahmedabad, have seen increasing ghettoisationsince 1991. This enforced ghettoisation following frequent communal clashes, iso-lates communities from each other, ruptures normal social interaction and inter-de-pendencies, and creates a dangerous climate within localities and colonies wheredemonisation and stereotyping of the ‘other’ becomes so much easier. This is hardlyconducive to peace and social harmony in a multi-religious, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society like ours. Active steps at the policy level need to be taken to reverse thetrend, which is being so cynically promoted by the RSS/Vishwa Hindu Parishad/BJP.
6.1. Gujarat, claimed as the laboratory of Hindutva where ‘a successful experiment’was recently conducted by proponents of this ideology, has seen a grosscommunalisation of public spaces in many of its cities, Ahmedabad probably beingthe worst. Today, there are many schools, especially elite and middle class ones, that will simply not admit Muslim children. Despite complaints being filed, the government has done little to curb or control this sort of discrimination. During the Gujaratcarnage, medical doctors were seen leading the carnage and clinics and hospitals wereused to plan the attacks. Dr. Praveen Togadia of the VHP is a cancer surgeon whilehis second-in-command in Gujarat, Jaideep Patel, is also a doctor. During the car-nage, the Sola Civil Hospital, Ahmedabad, was almost entirely out of bounds forseverely injured Muslims in need of urgent medical attention. The VS hospital, on theother hand, was accessible and that is where most of the injured were taken. Untillate April, goon squads of the Sangh Parivar sporting saffron scarves around theirnecks stalked the VS hospital’s corridors, brandishing bared swords to terrorise Muslims into running away. Muslims in the police force, other government departments,or in the public sector, too, have been completely alienated and have to face constanthumiliation and threats.
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7.1. With regard to the state examinations for the Standards X and XII, which tookplace in end-March and early-April 2002, the Gujarat government was openly parti-san. The examination centres of Hindu children were relocated to majority-predomi-nant areas, while terrorised Muslim students were forced to appear for examinationsin Hindu-majority localities where VHP/BD goons roamed the streets. The govern-ment refused to re-schedule exams, whether of Std X and XII or RTBA and MA II,despite pleas from Muslims as thousands of students were physically dislocated andemotionally tormented by what the community had been through.
8.1. The state-sponsored carnage economically crippled the Muslim commu-nity which suffered losses to the extent of Rs. 3,800 crores, according to inde-pendent estimates. The Gujarat Chamber of Commerce has estimated the pri-mary damage to industrial outfits, hotels and establishments belonging to theMuslim minority at around Rs. 2,000 crores. Non-Muslims, too, suffered heavilydue to the disruption of economic activities. Of the over 20,000 persons wholost their jobs as a result of the destruction of hotels belonging to Muslims,some 7-8,000 were from the tribal Rabari community. Today, the majority com-munity, too, feels the impact of the economic devastation sorely. (See chapter onEconomic Destruction, Volume II).
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9.1. Like other parts of India, Gujarat too has been home to a live syncretic cultureenriched by different traditions. Local history, shrines, language and poetry reflectthis. One tragic consequence of the Gujarat carnage has been the systematic targetingof numerous symbols of Muslim culture, be they the shrines of great Indian classicalsingers, litterateurs, dargahs or centuries-old mosques. (See chapter on Religious and Cultural Desecration, Volume II).
10.1. The situation in Gujarat was so malignant that for weeks it was difficult forMuslims to be hailed by their names even in elite Hindu-predominant parts of the cityof Ahmedabad. Many Hindus shaved off their beards for fear of being mistaken asMuslims. In the genocidal climate that prevailed, every aspect of a Muslim’s identitywas a target for violence.
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11.1. The sheer brutality of the violence triggered a mass migration of Muslimsfrom Gujarat. Daily wage earners from Naroda have fled to Karnataka andMaharashtra, their native states. Thousands from Panchmahal and other districts movedto Rajasthan and UP. In many cases, Muslim girls have been sent back to their nativeplaces in rural UP, thus putting an end to their education.
12.1. The impact of the recent carnage in Gujarat, and the years of hate campaignsthat preceded it, is not restricted to Gujarat alone. It has already impacted into intra-community and state-citizen relations in other parts of the country. It is thereforecritical that drastic measures are initiated soon, to bring justice to the victim-survi-vors of the Gujarat carnage, ensure reparation and heal the deep wounds caused bythe unprecedented violence. It is imperative that the government of India absorbs thefull message and meaning of Gujarat and ensures that this sort of violent mobilisationis not allowed to grow and spread in other states of the country.
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13.1. Experience shows that any community which feels threatened and vulnerabletends to cling harder to past traditions and lapses into more conservative religio-culturalpractices, especially with regard to women. The apparent burgeoning of the burqa in Mumbaiafter the 1992-1993 pogrom against Muslims is a case in point. The widespread incidentsof sexual crimes against women have given rise to a similar trend in Gujarat.
14.1.The common man’s threat perception has increased dramatically since the car-nage in Gujarat. The Tribunal gathered evidence to show that there was a steep rise inthe demand for ammunition by those licensed to carry firearms. The largest gun dealerin Ahmedabad, and arms dealers in Vadodara, have recorded a marked increase in thesale of cartridges, revolvers, pistols, and guns. There are over 3,300 licensed armsholders in Surat. This growing need among citizens in Gujarat to arm themselves, is adangerous trend, to say the least. With faith in the state and the police machinerytotally eroded, this can only lead to more violence and internal conflict.
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15.1. Irrespective of what some of them might otherwise proclaim, by their actualconduct, the saffron brotherhood comprising of the RSS/VHP/BD/BJP/Shiv Sena among others, has increasingly demonstrated its hostility to the Indian Constitutionsince the late-eighties. Now, with state power in their hands, the hidden agenda isbeing pursued from within the government. The sectarian and undemocratic worldviewinherent in the very ideology of Hindutva has, in the past decade, been explicit in thepolitics of hate and violence preached and practised by its proponents. The politicalatmosphere in the country has been increasingly vitiated since the Somnath to Ayodhyarath yatra of the then BJP president, Sri LK Advani in 1990, culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjidon December 6, 1992.
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16.1. India’s respected stature before the global community as a secular, democraticnation has been irretrievably damaged by the state-sponsored carnage in Gujarat. Thatthis is so is apparent from the recent statements of Prime Minister, Shri Vajpayee andthe deputy Prime Minister, Shri Advani, both being forced to admit, while on foreignsoil, that the Gujarat carnage was a “blot on the nation.”
17.1. The violence in Gujarat was marked by the cynical manipulation andmobilisation of a section of Adivasis and Dalits for loot, rape and mass murder. TheSangh Parivar has worked assiduously and intensively since 1998, indoctrinating andtraining Dalits in urban areas and Adivasis in the tribal belts. Women from middle andupper middle class Hindu houses have participated in the violence. In Naroda andsome parts of Vadodara there have been disturbing signs of their egging on their mento brutal violence. They even actively participated in the looting of shops.
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18.1. The terrorist attack on Akshardham on September 24, 2002, shocked thecountry. It appeared to be a direct reaction to the Gujarat carnage. The mindlessattack on innocent worshippers at the Akshardham temple suggests a blind desire forrevenge and retaliation. It is the selfsame politics that governed the carnage unleashedafter the Godhra tragedy.
18.2. Unless this cynical cycle of violence and counter-violence is stopped, eco-nomic progress, a healthy society and development all around will be sacrificed. Nei-ther Gujarat, nor India can afford this. The deep schisms caused by the Godhra trag-edy, the post-Godhra carnage and the Akshardham attack will take years to heal. Thelives lost, often in the most inhuman and degrading way, cannot be recovered; homesdestroyed, looted and burnt will take years of tearful labour to reconstruct; propertieslost and destroyed in the calculated violence have been lost forever.
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18.3.More difficult than effective reparation and reconstruction will be the hugelydifficult task of restoration of trust between victim-survivors and the rest, a faith soutterly destroyed in the most brutal way.
18.4. After the attack on the temple, which claimed 28 innocent lives, the plea of aparent who had lost a child in the massacre comes to mind. Telecast all over the networks, she pleaded strongly that her sorrow was private, that she did not wanther grief to be converted into political capital. Victims of the arson who lived atNaroda had made similar pleas following the Godhra carnage but they went cyni-cally unheeded.
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18.5. Genuine reconciliatory measures at community levels, unmindful of politicalconsiderations need to be undertaken. Justice must be done and the guilty punishedfor peace and reconciliation to result. How successfully the physical and emotionalhealing takes place is dependant on the sincerity of the efforts made by politicians,the administration, the police and other sections of society.The system needs to be cleansed and a genuine commitment to secularism anddemocracy reaffirmed.
18.6. The message that needs to go out is that the poison of communalism, whichis the politics of hatred and division, can take us only further on the road to disaster.The ordinary Hindu, the Muslim and people of other faiths have no faith in this; it iscynical politicians who have been playing with this dangerous fire.
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19.1. If this report, concerned with unveiling the truth and identifying the hate-mongers, the instigators and the perpetrators of violence, points to a very grim reality,it must not be concluded that there is no room for hope any longer. The Tribunalremains convinced that the vast majority of Indians, whatever their caste, creed, orcommunity, still believe in tolerance and compassion. Even at the height of the state-sponsored carnage and at great personal risk, many individuals and organisationsshowed great courage, and, through word and action, worked for peace and amity.This is true of Gujarat as much as the rest of India. It is to such individuals andorganisations that the state should turn, and engage with them to initiate an actionplan for political cleansing, for cleansing of the administration, for the secularisationof public space and for the speedy delivery of justice to those so brutally and morallywronged by the hate-bred violence.
