[Reader-list] CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY

[rustam]

                      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)

****************************************************************
* NOTE CHANGE IN OUR EMAIL ADDRESS: PLEASE NOTE IT AS FOLLOWS  *
****************************************************************
         CENTRE FOR SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT  ( CSE )
 41, TUGHLAKABAD INSTITUTIONAL AREA, NEW DELHI- 110 062
            TELE:        608 1110, 608 1124  
                         608 3394, 608 6399  
            FAX :        91-11-608 5879                      
            VISIT US AT: http://www.cseindia.org

                Email: rustam at cseindia.org
****************************************************************