AHMEDABAD, India, 23 February 2007 — Five years ago, Abdul Razzak, an aging Muslim shopkeeper, cheated death by hiding among the corpses of his daughter and three grandchildren slaughtered by a Hindu mob in one of India’s worst religious riots. “It’s a shame I tried to live while my family lay dead around me,” Razzak said in Ahmedabad, the main city in the western state of Gujarat. “I have not been able to live down my cowardice.”
More than 2,500 people, mostly Muslims, were burned and hacked to death in monthlong violence across Hindu-majority Gujarat five years ago, human rights groups say, although officials put the death toll at about 1,000. The reprisal attacks on Muslims erupted after a fire broke out on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims on Feb. 27, 2002, killing 59 people in Godhra town near Ahmedabad.
Razzak, a sinewy, bespectacled man, says he now lives only to see if the rioters who killed his family are brought to justice. Most Muslim community leaders and riot victims interviewed by Reuters say that even now the wounds have not healed.
Many feel they have neither received justice from a biased police nor succor from the state’s Hindu-extremist government, heightening their sense of alienation. India’s Supreme Court has said the state government in Gujarat was complicit in the killings.
Rights activists say nothing has been done to assuage the feelings of Gujarat’s Muslims. “From rehabilitation to compensation to conviction of the rioters, virtually nothing has happened,” said Teesta Setalvad, head of civil rights group Citizens for Justice and Peace.
While most victims appear reconciled to their long wait for justice, some like Inayat Rahim Sayeed, a 36-year-old unemployed man whose mother and two children were hacked to death, do not hide their anger. Chief Minister Narendra Modi is accused of ordering the riots with an eye on the Hindu votes in an election that year, and of subverting justice so that the rioters went unpunished.
NGOs say only about a dozen people have been convicted from 3,200 cases filed. Some 5,000 Muslim families feel unable to go back to their homes because of threats from Hindus.
