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Gujarat victims were 'stripped, burned and hacked'
By Peter Popham in Delhi
27 April 2002, The Independent
Two months after the event that triggered Gujarat's
pogrom,
Muslims in the western Indian state are still
counting the cost.
Yesterday, 40 survivors came to Delhi to tell
journalists and
parliamentarians how their relatives and friends
had been stripped,
raped, burned and mutilated.
A boy of 11, Raja Bundubhai, recalled seeing his
mother and sister
stabbed then burned alive. A woman identified as Reshma
recounted how she saw a heavily pregnant woman
called Kausar
Bano "being brutally raped ... Her stomach was
carved open, her
baby flung into the fire before she was sexually
abused, cut up and
burnt."
On 27 February, a mob of Muslims in the town of
Godhra attacked
a train carriage full of Hindu activists returning
from the temple town
of Ayodhya, killing 59. Hindu retaliation in the
days that followed left
hundreds of Muslims dead inpogroms that shamed
India and
appalled the world.
And although the scale of violence has slackened,
peace has yet to
return to the state, famed as the home of Mahatma
Gandhi and as
an economic powerhouse before it became a byword
for savagery.
At least 35 people have been killed in Ahmedabad,
the commercial
capital, in the past week. "They [Hindus] provoke
us by yelling
insults and bursting crackers during the night,"
said Iqbal Kansara,
who lives in Juhapura, a large Muslim area.
"Youngsters who can't
stand the insults come out to retaliate and police
fire at them."
The state government says some 850 people have died
in the
violence, but a secret report by British diplomats
leaked this week
to the BBC says at least 2,000 died. The report
claims that far from
being a spontaneous eruption of Hindu anger after
the Godhra
outrage, the violence was pre-planned and carried
out with the
support of the state government.
The British officials said the violence had all the
marks of ethnic
cleansing, and that reconciliation between Hindus
and Muslims was
impossible while the controversial chief minister,
Narendra Modi,
was in place. Mr Modi heads the Hindu nationalist
BJP government,
and Gujarat is now the only sizeable state where
the party that
leads the ruling coalition in Delhi is in power.
For this reason the
central government is accused by the opposition of
doing nothing to
bring about normality. A censure motion on the
government's
performance on Gujarat will be debated next week.
Delhi claims Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, has
apologised for
the leaking of the report, but there have been many
European
rebukes.A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said some
governments
were interfering and could damage relations. The
"interference",
however, is unlikely to end as long as the
government ignores the
worst communal bloodletting in 10 years.
Tens of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat remain
crammed into
squalid camps, too scared to return to their homes.
Some
commentators believe cold political calculation by
the BJP is to
blame. The Indian Express said: "Because of the
severe beating
that the Muslims have taken ... no Hindu is safe unless
governments ... partial to us are put in place."
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