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CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY
Reflections on the Gujarat massacre
By
Harsh Mander
Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat
ten days after the terror and massacre that convulsed
the state. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my
shoulders aching with the burdens of guilt and shame.
As you walk through the camps of riot survivors in
Ahmadabad, in which an estimated 53,000 women, men,
and children are huddled in 29 temporary settlements,
displays of overt grief are unusual. People clutch
small bundles of relief materials, all that they now
own in the world, with dry and glassy eyes. Some talk
in low voices, others busy themselves with the tasks
of everyday living in these most basic
of shelters, looking for food and milk for children,
tending the wounds of the injured.
But once you sit anywhere in these camps, people begin
to speak and their words are like masses of pus
released by slitting large festering wounds. The
horrors that they speak of are so macabre, that my pen
falters in the writing. The pitiless brutality
against
women and small children by organised bands of armed
young men is more savage than anything witnessed in
the riots that have shamed this nation from time to
time during the past century.
I force myself to write a small fraction of all that I
heard and saw because it is important that we all
know. Or maybe also because I need to share my own
burdens.
What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant
who begged to be spared. Her assailants instead slit
open her stomach, pulled out her foetus and
slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say
about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding
their house with water and then electrocuting them
with high-tension electricity.
What can you say?
A small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his
mother and six brothers and sisters were battered to
death before his eyes. He survived only because he
fell unconscious, and was taken for dead.
A family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the
worst-hit settlements in Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a
young woman and her three month old son, because a
police constable directed her to `safety' and she
found herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused
her with kerosene and set her and her baby on fire.
I have never known a riot which has used the sexual
subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of
violence in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat.
There are reports every where of gang-rape,
of young girls and women, often in the presence of
members of their families, followed by their murder by
burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in
one case with a screw driver.
Women in the Aman Chowk shelter told appalling stories
about how armed men disrobed themselves in front of a
group of terrified women to cower them down further.
In Ahmedabad, most people I met - social workers,
journalists, survivors - agree that what Gujarat
witnessed was not a riot, but a terrorist attack
followed by a systematic, planned massacre, a
pogrom. Everyone spoke of the pillage and plunder,
being organised like a military operation against an
external armed enemy. An initial truck would arrive
broadcasting inflammatory slogans, soon followed by
more trucks which disgorged young men, mostly in khaki
shorts and saffron sashes. They were armed with
sophisticated explosive materials, country weapons,
daggers and trishuls. They also carried water
bottles, to sustain them in their exertions. The
leaders were seen communicating on mobile telephones
from the riot venues, receiving instructions from and
reporting back to a co-ordinating centre. Some were
seen with documents and computer sheets
listing Muslim families and their properties. They
had detailed precise knowledge about buildings and
businesses held by members of the minority community,
such as who were partners say in a restaurant
business, or which Muslim homes had Hindu spouses were
married who should be spared in the violence. This
was not a spontaneous upsurge of mass anger. It was
a carefully planned pogrom.
The trucks carried quantities of gas cylinders. Rich
Muslim homes and business establishments were first
systematically looted, stripped down of all their
valuables, then cooking gas was released
from cylinders into the buildings for several minutes.
A trained member of the group then lit the flame
which efficiently engulfed the
building. In some cases, acetylene gas which is used
for welding steel, was employed to explode large
concrete buildings. Mosques and dargahs were razed,
and were replaced by statues of Hanuman and
saffron flags. Some dargahs in Ahmedabad city
crossings have overnight been demolished and their
sites covered with road building material, and
bulldozed so efficiently that these spots are
indistinguishable from the rest of the road. Traffic
now plies over these former dargahs, as though they
never existed.
The unconscionable failures and active connivance of
the state police and administrative machinery is also
now widely acknowledged. The police is known to have
misguided people straight into the hands of
rioting mobs. They provided protective shields to
crowds bent on pillage, arson, rape and murder, and
were deaf to the pleas of the desperate Muslim
victims, many of them women and children. There
have been many reports of police firing directly
mostly at the minority community, which was the target
of most of the mob violence.
The large majority of arrests are also from the same
community which was the main victim of the pogrom.
As one who has served in the Indian Administrative
Service for over two decades, I feel great shame at
the abdication of duty of my peers
in the civil and police administration. The law did
not require any of them to await orders from their
political superivisors before they
organised the decisive use of force to prevent the
brutal escalation of violence, and to protect
vulnerable women and children from the
organised, murderous mobs. The law instead required
them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially,
decisively, with courage and compassion. If even one
official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he
could have deployed the police forces and called in
the army to halt the violence and protect the people
in a matter of hours. No riot can continue beyond a
few hours without the active connivance of the
local police and magistracy. The blood of hundreds of
innocents are on the hands of the police and civil
authorities of Gujarat, and by sharing in a conspiracy
of silence, on the entire higher bureaucracy of the
country.
I have heard senior officials blame also the
communalism of the police constabulary for their
connivance in the violence. This too
is a thin and disgraceful alibi. The same forces have
been known to act with impartiality and courage when
led by officers of professionalism and integrity. The
failure is clearly of the leadership of the police and
civil services, not of the subordinate
men and women in khaki who are trained to obey their
orders.
Where also, amidst this savagery, injustice, and human
suffering is the `civil society', the Gandhians, the
development workers, the NGOs, the fabled spontaneous
Gujarathi philanthropy which was so much
in evidence in the earthquake in Kutch and Ahmedabad?
The newspapers reported that at the peak of the
pogrom, the gates of Sabarmati Asram
were closed to protect its properties, it should
instead have been the city's major sanctuary. Which
Gandhian leaders, or NGO managers,
staked their lives to halt the death-dealing throngs?
It is one more shame that we as citizens of this
country must carry on our already burdened backs, that
the camps for the Muslim riot victims in
Ahmedabad are being run almost exclusively by Muslim
organisations.
It is as though the monumental pain, loss, betrayal
and injustice suffered by the Muslim people is the
concern only of other Muslim people, and the rest of
us have no share in the responsibility to assuage, to
heal and rebuild. The state, which bears the primary
responsibility to extend both protection and relief to
its vulnerable citizens, was nowhere in evidence in
any of the camps, to manage, organise the security, or
even to provide the resources that are
required to feed the tens of thousands of defenceless
women, men and children huddled in these camps for
safety.
The only passing moments of pride and hope that I
experienced in Gujarat, were when I saw men like Mujid
Ahmed and women like Roshan Bahen who served in these
camps with tireless, dogged humanism amidst
the ruins around them. In the Aman Chowk camp, women
blessed the young band of volunteers who worked from
four in the morning until after midnight to ensure
that none of their children went without food or milk,
or that their wounds remained untended. Their leader
Mujid Ahmed is a graduate, his small chemical dyes
factory has been burnt down, but he has had no time to
worry about his own loss.
Each day he has to find 1600 kilograms of foodgrain to
feed some 5000 people who have taken shelter in the
camp. The challenge is even greater for Roshan Bahen,
almost 60, who wipes her eyes each time
she hears the stories of horror by the residents in
Juapara camp. But she too has no time for the
luxuries of grief or anger. She barely sleeps, as her
volunteers, mainly working class Muslim women and men
from the humble tenements around the camp, provide
temporary toilets, food and solace to the hundreds
who have gathered in the grounds of a primary school
to escape the ferocity of merciless mobs.
As I walked through the camps, I wondered what
Gandhiji would have done in these dark hours. I
recall the story of the Calcutta riots, when Gandhi
was fasting for peace. A Hindu man came to him, to
speak of his young boy who had been killed by Muslim
mobs, and of the depth of his anger and longing for
revenge. And Gandhi is said to have replied: If you
really wish to overcome your pain, find a young boy,
just as young as your son, a Muslim boy whose parents
have been killed by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy
like you would your own son, but bring him up with
the Muslim faith to which he was born. Only
then will you find that you can heal your pain, your
anger, and your longing for retribution.
There are no voices like Gandhi's that we hear today.
Only discourses on Newtonian physics, to justify
vengeance on innocents. We need to find these voices
within our own hearts, we need to believe enough in
justice, love, tolerance.
There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have
robbed from me. One of them is a song I often sang
with pride and conviction. The words of the song are:
> >Sare jahan se achha
> >Hindustan hamara> ...>
> >It is a song I will never be able to sing again.
> >(Harsh Mander, the writer, is a serving IAS
Officer,
> >who is working on deputation with a development
organisation)
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