PANDARWADA, 4 August — Meher-un-nissa is home again, but the 10-year-old can’t forget the morning last March when home became hell. Hundreds of armed men raced into her narrow lane, broke down doors, dragged out screaming residents, attacked them with swords and sticks and set their houses on fire. Meher-un-nissa’s father, urging his family to escape, was the last to flee. When the child looked back, she saw a sword slice off two fingers from the hand her father was holding up to protect himself. Then someone stabbed at her with a sword too, tearing open the flesh on her upper back. She remembers the pain and the voices all around her urging, "Kill the Muslim child."
That was the season when hundreds of people in the western state of Gujarat were killed in India’s worst Hindu-Muslim clashes in a decade. The killings began on Feb. 27; after 72 hours of complete mayhem, violence continued to flare for almost six weeks. The unofficial death toll now exceeds 2,000, and the vast majority of the dead are Muslims. Women’s groups and human-rights organizations like the Citizen’s Initiative have published scores of testimonies from eyewitnesses claiming that women were gang-raped. Tens of thousands of Muslims fled their homes to more than 100 refugee camps.
By July, virtually all of those camps were shut down and some survivors are now coming home. As Meher-un-nissa and her friends walk around their village of Pandarwada in eastern Gujarat, they pass the charred ruins that were their homes and the canvas tents they are now forced to occupy. Encountering an elderly Hindu lady, the children fall silent, waiting for a smile or a nod-the usual greeting in a village where everyone knows one another. But the woman refuses to acknowledge them. The local mosque has been destroyed, and someone has scrawled on a nearby wall: "We don’t want any Muslims here."
Gujarat’s wounds should be slowly healing. Instead, new injuries are being inflicted daily. Muslims brave enough to come back are finding they’re not welcome even in towns and villages they’ve called home for generations. Many have been told that their only chance of regaining a normal life is to withdraw accusations of rape and murder against their neighbors. Pandarwada is a typical case. In March, the marauding mobs tried to shield their faces but were recognized anyway, and some 90 criminal complaints have been filed, though no arrests have yet been made. Headman Anilbhai Manubhai Modi is among the accused, but his uncle initially denies that at least 27 Muslims were killed in their 600-family farming village, then relents, explaining darkly that there were "reasons." Other Hindus, when questioned, merely mutter vaguely about "God’s will." The returning Muslims don’t know where this leaves them. "We lived together quite happily," recalls farmer Faiz Mohammad Khan. The change precedes the slaughters of February and March: Several years back, some prominent Hindus in the village began organizing meetings of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), extremist champions of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). "They came here and talked about Muslims, how all of us have weapons, and that Hindus had to protect themselves," says Khan. "Now no one cares about us and we have no faith in them. But we have nowhere else to go."
Adding political insult to injury, Gujarat’s top politician, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, dissolved the local legislature in mid-July and called for early elections-to cash in, his political opponents allege, on support from the majority Hindu population in the wake of the violence. (89.5% of the state’s population is Hindu and just 8.5% Muslim.) That provoked an uproar in New Delhi’s Parliament last week, as the opposition accused the ruling party of backing Modi, the leader of the Gujarat BJP. But Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani did not relent. "You abuse a chief minister day in and day out and then expect him not to go to the people?" he argued. "The chief minister needs a certificate of the people of Gujarat and he will get that." No doubt, analysts say. "The Hindu chauvinist government is looking for the Hindu vote," charges Chunibhai Vaidya of the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmadabad, former home of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a native Gujrati. "They feel what happened, whatever was achieved, was good."
In other words, the violence that began in February and went on until April isn’t fading into history. It’s a plank in an electoral platform-an ominous sign of how vulnerable Gujarat’s Muslims have become. "The system is just not functioning for the Muslims in Gujarat," complains Ahmadabad lawyer Mukul Sinha, a Hindu working to promote secularism in the state.
Jai Singh Rana, a Hindu, serves as headman of Ajanwa, a remote village in eastern Gujarat. When Muslims were attacked in his area in March, he ran to the local police outpost. They refused to help. One constable asked why Rana was bothering, expressing his personal opinion that "the Muslims deserve to die like dogs." Rana called a local legislator who said paramilitary troops would be sent. But by then, 11 Muslims had been killed.
Ajanwa’s Hindus and Muslims had lived in peace for years: Only in the past decade, with the rise of the BJP in both New Delhi and Gujarat, has the divide grown. Muslim survivors say BJP members led the attacks in March. Some were arrested, but the main organizers charged with the killings are still free. "If only those four or five people are caught, there would be no trouble in the village and we could go back," says Mushtaq, who chooses to live in the nearby town of Lunawada and commute to his farm 25 kilometers away. Local police say the accused instigators have disappeared, but the reporter met two — Raisingh Pula Baria and his cousin Salam Abha Baria — living openly in the village. Both identified themselves as members of the BJP, but denied they were involved in the killings. "We have talked to the Muslims and asked them to withdraw the charges," said Raisingh. "They know what they have to do but are being misguided by the headman." The BJP, they added, has hired lawyers to defend their uncle, who was jailed for participating in the riots.
Hindus who helped Muslims, like headman Rana, are receiving death threats. The VHP has circulated pamphlets urging Hindus to boycott Muslim businesses, refuse Muslims jobs and not work in their offices. Police reports on the riots adamantly emphasize that Muslims began them: The spark for the violence was a still unexplained firebombing of a train filled with Hindu pilgrims, in which 59 died. According to independent human-rights groups like the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, most Hindus arrested for rioting were released on bail within days. In the first hearing in July, a judge in Lunawada dismissed the case for lack of evidence-as, in fact, he probably had to. "First the police refuse to file proper complaints," explains Amrish Patel, a member of Jan Sangharsh Manch (Forum for People’s Struggle), a group that promotes Hindu-Muslim amity. "Then the police don’t investigate properly. There is no rule of law for the Muslims."
Bilqis Yaqub Rasool used to live in the village of Randhikpur. When a local mob began its attack, she escaped into a forest with some relatives, including her three-year-old daughter. After three days in hiding, the group was discovered. Rasool watched as the mob smashed her daughter with a stone, killing her instantly. Then Rasool, who was five months pregnant, was raped by three assailants and left for dead. When she regained consciousness, all her relatives had been massacred.
Rasool now lives in a rented house in Godhra, a wealthy town of businessmen and farmers and a sizable Muslim population, with her husband, Yaqub, a cowherd. Rasool has identified all the members of the mob in a police complaint, including her three rapists. To date, none have been arrested. "They send word from the village that they will kill us both," says Yaqub. "If the government wanted, they could arrest all these people." He claims they’ve been spared because they are members of the BJP.
Gujarat, the birthplace of the mahatma, is a proudly pious state where alcohol is banned and vegetarianism extolled. Modi is expected to win the elections there handily. But there are some signs of a backlash, of public revulsion at what has occurred since February. "It was a doomed, horrible time and best forgotten," laments a shopkeeper in Ahmadabad, who admits to running with a mob that killed 83 people in the neighborhood of Naroda. "I think everyone lost all sense. Muslims were killed, but in the end we all suffered."
Almost all the Muslim victims from the countryside talk gratefully of the help they received from Hindus—though, most often, in villages other than their own—who hid them and brought them to the refugee camps. Still, anger is rising and retaliation possible. Earlier this month, a crude bomb exploded in a village, killing three Hindus near a school, and locals quickly blamed it on avenging Muslims. In Pandarwada, the Muslims are worried about the state elections. If Modi’s side wins, they say, none of their attackers will be punished. Which makes going back to their old lives all but impossible. Ghani Ahmed, a driver, lives in a canvas tent but he’s already purchased new books for his children to replace the ones torched in March because he wants them to become educated professionals. But his kids aren’t in school: Their names were struck off the rolls after they missed several months of classes. "They knew the children were in camps but they don’t want them back," says Ahmed. Then he laughs wearily and says caustically, "I am going to send them to a madrasa instead." These days, steely sarcasm is just about the only defense around.
