Belatedly Western Media has taken note of Gujarat's 2002
Communal Riots. Now that International Criminal Court has become
overactive, issuing orders on war crimes and genocidal massacres
unleashed by state agencies, it is bound to turn towards Asia and its
record on human rights violations bordering on crimes against humanity.
It has to come in as justice and political will to prosecute criminals
of such heinous crimes against humanity is still dithering and guilty
are roaming around scot-free.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>
-------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
AHMEDABAD, India — The police stood by as Hindu mobs slaughtered nearly
1,000 people, mostly Muslims, in massacres that evidence suggests were
an election-year ploy by state officials to garner votes. Mothers were
skewered, children set afire and fathers hacked to pieces.
Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>
-------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
Justice and ‘a Ray of Hope’ After 2002 India Riots
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Officials in Ahmedabad, India,
built the Citizen Nagar neighborhood for some of the thousands of
Muslims displaced by sectarian riots in 2002. By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: July 2, 2012
- Google+
- Share
- Reprints
Related
-
India Ink: Jafri Widow Receives Full Report on Riots (May 7, 2012)
-
Shaking Off the Horror of the Past in India (February 16, 2012)
-
31 Indians Convicted in Violence That Killed Muslims in 2002 (November 10, 2011)
Connect With Us on Twitter
Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines.Twitter List: Reporters and Editors
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Shareefa Bibi with a portrait of her 18-year-old son, Sharif, who was killed by a mob, she said, as the family sought shelter during the 2002 riots.
The New York Times
The riots began after a display of bodies in Ahmedabad.
That was 10 years ago. A decade later, the riots in Gujarat State may be
remembered less for the horrors they unleashed, however, than that such
sectarian carnage, which once struck India as often as a heavy monsoon,
has not been repeated since. There are many reasons for this
astonishing quiescence, but technology has played a crucial role. The
killers made cellphone calls, and records of those calls became
evidence.
After years of dithering, India’s creaky justice system lurched into
action. Hundreds of rioters have been convicted, and more cases are
pending. On Saturday, a judge trying 61 defendants — including a former
state education minister — delayed issuing verdicts until Aug. 29 in a
case that involves about 94 deaths. A total of 327 people testified, but
the crucial evidence, again, was the phone records contradicting claims
by some of the accused that they were nowhere near the scene of the
crimes.
Indeed, those same records continue to be examined for any role played in the riots by the office of the state’s top official, Narendra Modi,
who is among India’s most prominent politicians. But even if Mr. Modi
is never charged, the political calculus behind stoking sectarian
clashes — long a staple for winning elections here — has fundamentally
changed, political analysts say.
“We reached a tipping point,” said M. J. Akbar, author of “Riot After
Riot” and editorial director of India Today, one of India’s leading news
organizations. “This is the first time that India’s judicial system has
actually worked to hold people accountable for rioting. In the past,
the guilty never got punished.”
India was once the world’s wellspring of religiously inspired massacres.
As such violence rages across the Middle East, the bougainvillea
sprouting from Gujarat’s charred buildings offers hope that even
societies steeped in blood can curb the self-perpetuating logic behind
such clashes.
Shakeel Ahmad, chairman of the Islamic Relief Committee in Gujarat, said
he was optimistic. About 150,000 people were displaced by the rioting
in 2002. Witnesses and other evidence suggest that the violence was
encouraged by state officials, who deny the charge. Dr. Ahmad’s son was
imprisoned for nearly seven years, accused of plotting against the life
of a state official who is now on trial himself.
During a lengthy interview in his office at the edge of a Muslim
neighborhood, Dr. Ahmad could not suppress a triumphant smile.
“There is a ray of hope,” he said in his office here, his white hair and
beard swirled in cigarette smoke. “For the first time in Gujarat, we
have seen demands for justice.”
To be sure, India’s politics are still vicious and violent, its society
riven by religious, cultural and caste divisions that feed continuing
discrimination and sporadically erupt in fury. Assassinations are
frequent, corruption endemic and the courts largely feckless.
Gujarat’s
Muslims have never entirely recovered from the riots, and the state’s
population is more religiously segregated than ever. No one can promise
that large-scale riots will never return, but there are signs of hope.
The riots began on Feb. 27, 2002, when a train filled with Hindu
pilgrims who had just visited a disputed shrine rolled into Godhra, a
small city in eastern Gujarat, and was attacked by a Muslim mob. A fire
started, and at least 58 Hindu pilgrims burned to death.
Their charred
bodies were brought to Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, and laid out
in public, an act that all but guaranteed more violence. Huge mobs
gathered to view the bodies.
At the time of the riots, Gujarat’s chief minister was Mr. Modi, a newly
appointed functionary from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which advocates
Hindu supremacy but faced sinking popularity in the state. Mr. Modi and
his party endorsed a widespread strike.
Massacres began immediately. About 20,000 Muslim homes and businesses
and 360 places of worship were burned. Later that year, Mr. Modi’s party
was overwhelmingly re-elected. Mayors in the United States are thrown
out when too much snow clogs streets; Mr. Modi let his streets be choked
with blood and won election overwhelmingly.
Mr. Modi was following a familiar script. In 1984, Sikh bodyguards
assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Hindu mobs in Delhi
killed thousands of Sikhs in retaliation. The Congress Party, whose
members encouraged the rioting, was rewarded later that year with a huge
majority in Parliament.
Commissions were formed to investigate, but
there were few arrests and fewer convictions. After the 1992
Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai, in which 900 people were killed,
commission recommendations were again ignored.
Commissions were impaneled after the Gujarat riots as well. A top state
official told one panel that Mr. Modi ordered officials to take no
action against rioters. That official was murdered. Thousands of cases
against rioters were dismissed by the police for lack of evidence
despite eyewitness accounts.
But in 2004, the Supreme Court intervened, acting on petitions from
human rights groups. The court ordered that more than 2,000 dismissed
cases be reopened, a special police team be created and some trials be
transferred out of Gujarat. The wheels of justice began to turn, leading
more victims to press claims.
That year, a lawyer representing victims was cross-examining a top
police official when the official laid a CD on the table in front of
him.
“What’s that?” asked the lawyer, Dr. Mukul Sinha.
“Evidence,” answered the officer, Rahul Sharma.
The CD contained records of every cellphone call made in Ahmedabad
during the worst of the rioting.
The records allowed advocates to
construct precise timelines of the movements of many rioters, timelines
that often dovetailed with the accounts of riot victims but contradicted
those of the accused.
Dr. Sinha is still mining the records for evidence, but Mr. Modi’s
government is vigorously trying to suppress the investigation, charging
the officer who provided the records with violating the Official Secrets
Act.
The cellphone records have proved invaluable to prosecutors. While no
government agency or court seems to have a scorecard of how many people
have been convicted, state and court records show that they number in
the hundreds, with scores more due for judgments.
Gujarat state officials and representatives for Mr. Modi did not respond
to multiple interview requests or to a list of e-mailed questions.
Mr. Modi’s role in the rioting continues to plague him and his party.
Two years after the riots, his alliance lost its hold over the national
government. Important members of the group have warned against Mr. Modi’s selection as the alliance’s candidate for prime minister in the
2014 elections. Yet Mr. Modi remains popular in Gujarat, where he has
recast himself as an economic problem-solver.
Steven I. Wilkinson, a professor of political science at Yale University
who has studied India’s riots, said that India’s national elections had
become so competitive that no political party could afford to alienate
Muslims, who represent 13 percent of the electorate, about the same
share that blacks represent in the United States.
“Riots are now a stain on your reputation forever in a way they never were before,” he said.
On a recent morning, Shareefa Bibi sat outside her reconstructed house
in the Muslim neighborhood of Naroda Patiya. She recalled fleeing a mob
with her husband and five children to a nearby police camp, where
officers refused to protect them.
“They said, ‘No, you have to die today,’ ” she recalled bitterly. The
family ran to another neighborhood and hid, but in the confusion her
18-year-old son, Sharif, was caught by rioters, gutted and set on fire.
Cowering just a few feet away with her other children, Ms. Bibi watched
him die.
She testified against her son’s killers, whose judgments have been delayed until Aug. 29.
“I will never get my son back,” Ms. Bibi said. “But our hope is that we will get justice.”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
