[Reader-list] Gujarat's Muslims

[Shivam Vij शिवम् विज्]

Everybody loves a victim

Neelesh Misra, Hindustan Times
December 10, 2007
First Published: 20:56 IST(10/12/2007)
Last Updated: 21:06 IST(10/12/2007)

Labels come easy and crisp in Gujarat. Pro-Modi. Anti-Modi. For the
rest of the world, you are either with him or against him. Which is
why when it comes to the Muslims of Gujarat, and the Muslim victims of
the 2002 riots, it is best to stick to the safe story: Muslims live in
mortal fear in Gujarat and non-governmental organisations have given a
new life to riot victims.

Or, I could tell you the truth — how many in the media and many NGOs
want to keep Gujarat's Muslims refrigerated as 'victims' for all
foreseeable times to come — even if those in the community don't want
to be seen as victims, even if it works against them, and even if they
want to unshackle themselves and get on with their lives for their
future.

How else does one explain the media's complete inability — or
reluctance — to describe Gujarat's Muslims in no way other than
whiners? How can they not see and write about Gujaratis like the
maulana I met who bought an apartment from his stock market earnings,
the Muslims running English-medium schools in the ghettos, the stock
broker who lost everything in the riots and went on to pioneer Islamic
finance in India, the riot survivors now writing TOEFL exams and
getting ready to go overseas to study? Or the sprawling Jamiat
Ulema-e-Hind school for riot and earthquake orphans — Hindus and
Muslims —in remote Kutch that has changed hundreds of lives?

Or how they ignore simple facts: Muslims in Gujarat have a literacy
rate of 73 per cent, more than Muslims anywhere, and more than the
national average. Gujarat's 45 lakh Muslims — just over 9 per cent of
the state's population — fare better than the national average for all
religions on several counts including sex ratio and work
participation. Yes, Muslims and Hindus don't get homes in each other's
neighbourhoods. There is actually a law in Gujarat that bans such
sales in several places. Yes, Muslims do feel discriminated against in
many areas. But they are doing all this despite all that. Modi or no
Modi, Gujarat's Muslims are armed with the supreme weapon that every
Gujarati is armed with: their centuries-old entrepreneurial spirit. No
amount of imposed victimhood can take that away.

Yet, there is a deep and astounding disconnect between what we in the
media believe the condition of Gujarat's Muslims to be and what it
actually is. And maybe there is a lesson in that. Still, the image of
Gujarat's Muslims as perceived outside Gujarat and outside India is
one we have created and nurtured: that they are helpless victims, no
better than second-class citizens.

Then there are the NGOs. Many of these organisations took money from
the riot victims before letting them live there. In Godhra, for
example, a two-room set with plastered walls took about Rs 33,000 to
build, and the families paid Rs 20,000 each for them. They begged and
borrowed from friends and family members, scrounged and somehow put
together the amounts. That doesn't sound like relief to me. It sounds
like a subsidised real estate deal.

Worse, these families don't even own these two-room sets. The
properties have not been transferred in their names and they are
technically illegal squatters. The head of the Islamic Relief
Committee, which supervised these constructions, told me that this was
done "so that the riot victims don't sell those homes... that sort of
thing happens here". And that money was taken from them "so that they
know that everything does not come free".

Then there's the place that provoked the National Commission of
Minorities to state, "If there is hell under the sun, it is here."
Citizen Nagar, a neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, is where Muslim riot
victims live next to the city's largest garbage dump, where sewage
flows through their lanes in the monsoons and they battle disease and
squalor.

For five years, Citizen Nagar is, for the NGOs, the symbol of what is
wrong with Gujarat's Muslims. They lost their livelihoods, they are
far from their places of work, schools or medical facilities. But who
chose that location? Who bought the land and resettled the families
near the reeking garbage dump? The same NGOs who are complaining
today. Rather than encourage and prepare them to return home or to
rebuild their lives, the NGOs, according to a prominent Muslim
philanthropist, "threw money at the families and created victims for
life".

It was haphazard, poorly thought out and downright cruel. First the
mad rioters killed people and Modi's government looked the other way.
And since then, the media and many NGOs are trying to ensure that they
always remain just that: victims.