NEW DELHI, 18 July 2003 — A victim of last year’s anti-Muslim riot in Gujarat yesterday told a judicial commission that a hard-core member of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led a mob that also consisted of policemen in an attack on his housing society.

Yunus Mohammed Usman Bhavnagari, a dentist from Paladi neighborhood in western Ahmedabad, said slogan shouting by Haren Pandya, a former minister in Gujarat, only instigated the mob further.

Bhavnagari was appearing before the commission headed by retired judge G.T. Nanavati, probing the causes of the sectarian violence.

Pandya was shot dead on March 26 this year, allegedly by those who wanted to avenge last year’s violence that claimed the lives of thousands of Muslims. Ahmedabad accounted for about half of the deaths.

“On Feb. 28, 2002, Pandya leading the mob and shouting anti-Muslim slogans came to my residence and dared me come out. Policemen too were part of the mob,” Bhavnagari told the commission. “Someone from the mob opened fire. My son Amir Bhavnagari was hit in his chest.”

Bhavnagari said he was forced to open fire at the mob in self-defense. He said he and his son were jailed for three months despite the fact that the report filed with the police at the time had clearly stated he had opened fire in “self-defense” with his “licensed revolver”.

Bhavnagari’s wife, son and other relatives told the commission the mob set ablaze their house in Delite Flats at Paladi.

He alleged the police, instead of protecting him, lobbed three teargas shells into his apartment while the mob went on torching 19 vehicles and two or three houses belonging to Muslims in Delite Flats.

Bhavnagari said he tried to contact the police for three-and-a-half hours but in vain. The mob dispersed only when a police patrol, headed by then deputy commissioner of police V.M. Parghi, arrived.

“We have not returned to our home as we have been threatened not to come back time and again,” Bhavnagari said.

Bhavnagari’s wife Tasneem said a man standing outside their apartment had asked her never to return when she went back to collect her belongings a few days later.

The family shifted to Kochrab neighborhood after the incident and they have also written to the National Human Rights Commission about their problems.

The Nanavati Commission, which will be here till July 22, began recording statements of violence victims and witnesses in Ahmedabad Wednesday.

Comprising retired judges Nanavati and K.G. Shah, the commission has invited people living in the areas covered by the Ellisbridge and Satellite police stations to depose before it.

Meanwhile, more instances of police inaction came to light in depositions before the commission Wednesday.

Three of the four people who deposed before the commission spoke of police inaction as they recounted the days of terror in Ahmedabad when the state was ripped apart by widespread sectarian violence.

Triveni Sharma, an advocate and resident of the Satellite neighborhood in south Ahmedabad, said she witnessed a mob setting a bus on fire near Shivranjani Crossroads on Feb. 28, 2002.

Another witness, Amirsh Patel, also an advocate, told the commission the “police had been a mute spectator on Feb. 28, 2002, as Hindu mobs, wearing saffron bandanas, were on the rampage. He said that he had witnessed the burning of a supermarket and a restaurant in the presence of policemen.

The third witness to depose before the commission was restaurateur Mulji Solanki, who lost four of his properties after mobs ransacked and torched them in Satellite and Ambawadi neighborhoods in the first two days of the violence. “Four of my restaurants were co-owned by me and four Muslim partners. They were targeted because of their Muslim ownership, as no other restaurant in the area was torched,” Solanki said.

— Additional input from Agencies