AHMEDABAD, 2 April — Their houses were burned, they were wounded and many lost their near and dear ones to the Hindu fury one month ago. But horror still continues to stalk those 97,000 of traumatized Muslims huddled up in 28 state-run relief camps scattered across Ahmedabad.

Last week around midnight 8,000 Muslims taking refuge in a relief camp at Shah-e-Alam Mosque woke up to a shrill cry of Hindu mobs baying for their blood. Frightened women, children and men started running helter-skelter. Calm returned only when policemen on guard informed: “Some young men are just having fun... don’t worry, go to sleep.”

“Next night the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) hoodlums returned to the same spot and played cassettes of blood-curdling cries and howls on loudspeakers to intimidate us and not to let us sleep,” said Bilal Khan, a 35-year-old camp inmate who had lost three of his family members in the riot.

Policemen on duty did not chase them away. Nor did they try to arrest those who were on a car fitted with a microphone; they left only when some paramilitary personnel on patrol arrived at the place, said Khan.

In an organized way many militant Hindu groups are still active in the state attacking and terrorizing the Muslims marooned in the relief camps and in those residential areas where they are in minority. The state government is facing severe criticism for the appalling conditions in the relief camps.

The grassroots level penetration of the BJP and its associates like the VHP, Bajrang Dal, Durgavahini — the women’s wing of Bajrang Dal and the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad — student wing of BJP) and the police were blindly toeing their political bosses to ensure that violence continues unabated in the state.

“There is no hope for any law and order semblance in Gujarat until the ruling Narendra Modi government gets its act together and starts behaving responsibly tackling the violence as criminal acts instead of sheltering those who slaughter in the name of Hindutava,” criticizes an editorial in Deccan Chronicle.

In its letter this week Amnesty International has slammed the state government for turning a blind eye to the woes of thousands of Muslims in the state. Quoting NGO workers and other witnesses the human rights organization said that in an “organized way innocent Muslim men, women and even children have been killed under the nose of the government and still now they are suffering in their camps and other minority ghettos.”

Neither Modi nor any of his Cabinet colleagues visited any of the camps in last one month. In another attempt to add to the woes of the Muslims, on Saturday Modi gave a new directive to empty “as many relief camps as possible” before Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visits to the state on April 4. Riot victims are being threatened that government will stop supplying essential supplies if they are present in the camps after tomorrow.

Those who lost their kins in the riot will not get any compensation unless they leave the camps by tomorrow, the inmates have been warned. At Modi’s behest officials at his secretariat have swung into action to ensure that riot victims leave the camps before Vajpayee visits Ahmedabad and a “positive picture of the law and order situation in Gujarat is presented to the prime minister.”

“The government is doing all this to create a show of normalcy when the prime minister visits Gujarat next week. This is inhuman but riot victims are being bundled out of the relief camps,” admitted an official overseeing the relief camps. “It is disgusting that Modi is not giving up his dirty politicking at such a crucial period also.”

After a fact-finding tour of Gujarat Dr. Kamal Mitra Chenoy of the NGO Sahmat organization said Hindu groups were simply waiting for an excuse to launch pre-meditated attacks on Muslims everywhere. The Sahmat report also speaks of appalling conditions in the state-run relief camps.

Modi who has been deliberately trying to project himself as a champion of Hindutva cause apparently feels that any rehabilitation package for riot victims — most of them being Muslims — would “terribly hurt Hindu sentiments.”

“At this stage any concrete rehabilitation package for them (the Muslims) would send wrong signals to Hindus,” Modi was overheard while speaking to a BJP leaders in New Delhi last week.

“By ignoring the emotion of the Hindus we (the BJP) have suffered in Uttar Pradesh in the February elections. For the party we cannot afford the same fate to be repeated in Gujarat again.”