By Zafar Aafaq / Clarion India
NEW DELHI – Thanks to the apathy of successive governments at the Centre towards the Muslim-centric bloodbath in Gujarat, thousands of victims are still striving to get justice. After 20 long years of wait, there seems to be no end to their struggle.
According to noted rights activist, Kavita Srivastava, justice eluded the victims of the pogrom from the day one because it was state sponsored massacre.
Speaking to Clarion India in an exclusive interview, the activist said, “The violence was not a riot, but a well-orchestrated genocide of Muslim, a preplanned conspiracy!.”
Recounting the sequence of incidents that led to a full-scale genocide of Muslims, Srivastava pointed out that then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, conducted a public display of the corpses of Hindu pilgrims to inflame passions. The pilgrims had died in the train burning incident of Godhra while returning from Ayodhya,
Pointing to the blatant discrimination in justice delivery, she said all non-Muslim victims of the violence, including the 54 kar sevaks who were burnt alive in the Godhra incident, were compensated with justice. Convicts in some of these cases were penalised with even death. But for Muslims, it’s still a pipedream.
She cited the violence of Narodha Patia, the killing of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri with many others in Gulbarg Society in support of her argument that the government had a role in the violence.
The human rights activist said the Gujarat pogrom was a watershed moment which marked the shift of the country towards the rise of Hindu nationalism. “Today, the situation of Muslims is such that there can be genocide any moment. The way they are being pushed to margins socially, economically and politically is a pointer to this eventuality.”
Teesta Setalvad, the human rights activist who has done prolific work on Gujarat riots recounted how the killing of Ehsan Jafri and the subsequent “demonisation and de-validation” of Muslims is a “chilling metaphor for the abandonment” of the Gujarati Muslims.
“Today, post 2014 this metaphor has been extended to nearly all of India,” she said.
Here is the chronology of the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Two coaches of Sabarmati Express burst into flames on 27 February 2002 at Godhra leaving 58 people dead. Politicians affiliated to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) thronged the spot. But instead of making efforts to pacify the situation, the elected representative made inflammatory speeches from the site. To add fuel to the fire, Gujarat newspapers gave a communal angle to the incident based on fake claims.
Violence erupted in Gujarat a day after when the Hindutva outfits called a statewide bandh in protest against the train burning incident. For the next three days, there was carnage; Muslims were literally butchered on the streets. The episodes of riots continued for months in one or the other part of the state. According to some estimates, as many as 2,000 Muslims were killed in one of the worst communal violence in independent India.
Prominent civil rights activist Harsh Mander writes in his book on Gujarat pogrom: “The killings were exceptional not just for their numbers but also for their ferocious brutality and for their ruthless targeting of women and children. Mass rape, sexual humiliation of women in public, and the battering and burning alive of girls, boys, women and men, marked those grim and overcast days. Tens of thousands of homes and small business establishments – petty shops, wooden carts, auto-rickshaws, taxi jeeps, eateries and garages – were set aflame, and cattle and lifetime savings looted. Hundreds of religious shrines were desecrated and destroyed in this carnage. All of this was only for one crime: the god they worshipped.”
The violence had a long lasting impact on Indian political and social life. Twelve years after the pogrom, Narendra Modi assumed the seat of Prime Minister after clinching majority in the general elections held in 2014.
According to author and journalist Nilanjan Mukhapaodhay , Godhra-Gujarat killings and the riots not just became a constant reference point – the fulcrum of political divide – for the next decade and more, but also prompted the emergence of Modi on the national centre-stage, albeit as anti-hero. Since 2014, India has seen a sharp slide towards majoritarianism with Muslims being hounded by the state emboldened Hindu nationalists.
This article first appeared on clarionindia.net