`We used to live together'
Divide widens for Muslims, Hindus in India
By CLAUDIA KOLKER
Special to the Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/front/1493297
AHMEDABAD, India -- Nearly five months after Hindu
rioters hammered him with rocks and torched his house,
Shaikh Salim still spends his nights in a Muslim
graveyard.
Hundreds of other Muslims doze around him, stretched
on tombs or curled next to ancient walls. They swarmed
here in February, chased by Hindu mobs that killed up
to 2,000 people. Like many of the 25,000 Muslims in
nearby camps, they no longer feel safe around Hindus.
"We all used to live together," says 20-year-old
Salim, shaking his head. Now he fears a Hindu mob
could swell again.
To many Indians, the persecution of the region's
Muslims marks a watershed for their society.
If the forces fueling this violence prevail, they
warn, India -- a nuclear power with 1 billion people
-- could cast off its democratic, secular tradition
and become a Hindu state. Its mix of faiths and social
castes could lose even the promise of equality.
Perhaps even more chilling, experts say, India's
Muslims -- the second-largest Muslim populace after
Indonesia's -- could turn in despair toward militancy.
"If this (persecution) doesn't end, India is doomed,"
says Sumit Ganguly, a University of Texas political
scientist conducting research in his native India. "A
multireligious, multiethnic society with as many
cross-cultural cleavages as this country has is going
to destroy itself."
The western state of Gujarat ignited Feb. 27, when
Muslims attacked a trainload of Hindu activists and
left 58 passengers dead. The next day, Hindus attacked
Muslims in nearby Ahmedabad and surrounding villages,
killing men, women and children. Whole neighborhoods
of women were raped, witnesses say, and at least
10,000 Muslim homes were torched. More than 100,000
people became homeless.
What happened here, Human Rights Watch and other
groups charge, was a pogrom -- an anti-Muslim purge
planned by Hindu extremists linked to India's ruling
party.
"This was not communal violence. This was an ethnic
cleansing," says the Rev. Victor Moses, a Jesuit
priest who coordinates relief groups in Ahmedabad.
"We're saying it was systematically planned and
organized."
A spokesman for Gujarat state's ruling party, a Hindu
nationalist group, rejects the accusations. "That is
all political, all political," says Ramdas Agarwal,
vice president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which
also holds the reins nationally. "These actions were
spontaneous."
But a tide of evidence to the contrary has horrified
scholars, human rights workers and a swath of ordinary
Hindus.
"The threat to our society cannot be underestimated,"
says Anirudh Deshpande, a historian of Hindu descent
at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library.
"What we are fearing is the complete collapse of civil
society -- the establishment of a Hindu nation in
which upper-caste Hindus will reign supreme and civil
liberties for those who disagree with them will end."
Others point out that India's Muslims have access to a
militant global movement for retaliation.
"What these (Hindu) zealots don't realize is that by
beating up on the Muslim minority, they are the best
friends of Osama bin Laden," says Ganguly, a Hindu.
"Each time you torment the Muslims here, you are
driving them against the wall. You are creating a
fifth column. You are not going to cow 130 million
Muslims into submission."
At the cemetery where Salim spends nights, crowds of
restive young men echo that warning. Fleeing Hindu
mobs, the men and their relatives made this graveyard
a crude refuge, jammed at its peak with 3,000 people.
There are no beds, no walls and only flimsy plastic
sheets to buffer sun and monsoon rain.
"How would Americans react if someone did these things
to you?" a young man with a high voice asks.
"Our children should join al-Qaida," another barks.
Turned into action, the refugee camp rhetoric would
mean a sea change for Indian Muslims, who make up
about 13 percent of the population. They have never
had much stomach for the militant Islam now seen in
Pakistan, parts of the Middle East and elsewhere,
experts say.
"The South Asian version of Islam is exceptionally
moderate and plastic," says Imtiaz Ahmad, a
sociologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University and a
Muslim. After centuries of intermingling, Islam and
Hinduism here have absorbed, even thrived upon, each
other's influences.
Hindu culture is by nature tolerant, scholars point
out. With no central authority and myriad deities
gleaned from other faiths, historic Hinduism bears
little resemblance to the narrow creed touted by
nationalists, says historian Pralay Kanungo, author of
a book on politics and Hinduism.
In the villages where most Indians live, Muslims and
Hindus eat in each other's homes, bargain for each
other's wares and pray before each other's shrines.
Before the recent riots, Muslims and Hindus clustered
separately in Salim's slum in old Ahmedabad. But the
shacks were so minute, the alleys parting them so
slim, everybody knew his neighbor. Salim stopped daily
at a Hindu shop, where jars of cardamom and sugar
lined blue walls and pouches of drinking water cooled
in pails of ice.
"The owner's name was Laxman Vasudav," Salim recalls,
waving off the flies trawling the graveyard's humid
air. "I used to go and chat with him, and he became my
friend."
Yet Indians are also painfully familiar with religious
riots. The most savage was in 1947, when India won
independence. At least 200,000 Muslims and Hindus died
in the bloodbath that accompanied the subcontinent's
division between India and Muslim Pakistan.
Since then, says historian Deshpande, even the
bloodiest episodes followed a pattern. After a few
days, the killing ended. Warring neighbors straggled
home. Tensions slid below a workaday civility.
Gujarat unraveled this, he says. The mobs killed for
weeks, and sporadic murders still bloody the summer.
The violence, he says, is the outcome of a trend
building for decades. "It's not cyclical; it's
linear," Deshpande says.
Pluralism began to falter badly in the 1980s, he adds,
with the rise of the "Hindutva" movement bent on a
Hindu-dominated state. Activists accused Muslims of
poaching jobs, spying for Pakistan, abetting Kashmir's
militants and staining India's Hindu character. In
1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party, leader of a Hindutva
coalition, won national power.
Then last February, Hindutva activists boarded a train
toward Gujarat. They were leaving Ayodhya, where
Hindus in 1992 razed a mosque they claimed straddled a
Hindu holy site. The train trip was chaotic, with
Hindus reportedly harassing Muslims. Near a town
called Godhra, a Muslim mob attacked. Fifty-eight
people were burned alive.
The assault happened spontaneously, railway police
said. Yet state and national BJP officials promptly
declared it a terroristic plot by Pakistani agents.
The next day, up to 10,000 Hindus rampaged through
Ahmedabad, a prosperous city of 3 million people about
60 miles from Godhra.
Most Muslims here are poor. Lately, though, some have
flourished, buying businesses such as a Best Western
hotel and homes in new Hindu-Muslim developments.
Their rising status stoked Hindutva ire, Ahmad and
other scholars say.
"Kill Muslims," the crowds chanted as they stormed
through Muslim areas. They burned alive whole
families, then looted and torched their homes, human
rights groups say. Downtown businesses, including the
Best Western, were gutted.
Salim was strolling home when thousands of Hindus
stampeded down his street. He scrambled to the roof.
Below, he saw his friend Vasudav hurling rocks at him,
along with others in the mob.
The anarchy soon spilled to nearby villages.
Officially, the death toll hovers near 1,000, but
Citizens' Initiative, a coalition of aid groups,
believes the actual number is about 2,000.
It was not the violence alone that stunned many
Indians. It was the evidence that the attacks were
planned -- and officially facilitated.
"Far from being spontaneous," concluded British
diplomats in a report leaked to the British
Broadcasting Corp., the violence "was planned,
possibly months in advance, and carried out by an
extremist Hindu organization with the support of the
state government."
According to Human Rights Watch, Hindus decked in the
khaki shorts and saffron scarves of Hindutva activists
descended on Muslim neighborhoods in trucks. They
lugged "sophisticated explosives" and tridents --
weapons featured in Hindu scriptures and in recent
years passed out at Hindu nationalist rallies.
The rioters stormed the city, Human Rights Watch says,
"guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of
Muslim families and their properties, information
obtained from the (city of) Ahmedabad, among other
sources." Hindu properties stand untouched, encircled
by burned Muslim homes and businesses.
As the rioters engulfed their victims, police officers
watched passively or even aided them, witnesses say.
Several who helped Muslims were later transferred,
says Communalism Combat, a human rights group in
Bombay.
The mayhem had a purpose, charges Virender Kumar,
Gujarat editor of the Indian Express, a daily
newspaper. "All over the state, BJP had lost a number
of elections," he says. "Their idea was to consolidate
the Hindu vote" by targeting a common enemy.
BJP Vice President Agarwal dismisses the claims. "Just
having the (saffron) flag in hand doesn't mean they
belong to the BJP," he says. "I am telling you these
reactions were spontaneous. Spontaneous reactions --
who can stop them?"
After the violence, polls showed that BJP support rose
sharply in the region.
Human rights monitors have called the government's
response to the riots shockingly deficient.
In early March, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendrar Modi
deemed the mob's acts "the natural and justified anger
of the people" after the Godhra train attack.
Seventy-two hours passed before state authorities
called in the Indian army; more time elapsed before
troops were deployed.
"There was a comprehensive failure of the state to
protect the constitutional rights of the people of
Gujarat," India's National Human Rights Commission
said.
At the national level, Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee
publicly condemned the violence but didn't visit
Gujarat for a full month. He has steadfastly defended
Modi, defying widespread calls to fire him for
incompetence.
Treatment of the displaced was equally telling, many
say. According to the New Delhi-based People's Union
for Democratic Rights, the state did not create a
single relief camp. Nongovernmental groups filled the
vacuum.
Wedged in cemeteries or near train tracks, the camps
today are dusty corridors, matted with lethargic
refugees. Though the state has pressured many camps to
close, several remain.
Plagued by memories of flames and blood, some of the
graveyard residents now whisper about fighting back.
These sentiments run wide, says editor Kumar. Militant
Islam is foreign here, but Gujarat may have smoothed
the way for enterprising outsiders.
Still, experts say, most Muslims here feel Indian.
They believe in the bruised dream of pluralism. Many
Hindus still cherish the dream, too.
"It's never been like this before," says 60-year-old
Sanjay Kaushalia Itel, a Hindu incense maker in a
burned-out housing compound. Her Muslim neighbors are
all gone. "About 6,000 people lived here. It's not
supposed to be this way."
At the cemetery, Salim announces he wants to see his
former friend Vasudav.
"I just have this question," Salim says. "We were all
friends. We lived together. Why did you do this?"
But when Salim enters Vasudav's cozy, sea-blue shop,
his neighbor does not acknowledge him. Unnerved, Salim
just stares, his eyes enormous, as Vasudav welcomes
another visitor into the shop.
"This violence happened because of the train
incident," Vasudav says. "It was politically
motivated, and it was wrong. It was not done by local
people." After a moment he adds uneasily, "I was also
there. But I didn't throw any stones."
Salim's blackened hut lies one block from the store.
Stalking out, Salim heads down the littered street.
Inside the cement shack, his parents squat on the dirt
floor, listlessly reviewing their possessions. Photos,
spoons, singed fabric -- all they have left -- crammed
into two dented buckets.
"If you take revenge, you have to live your whole life
that way," Salim says slowly, as if reciting something
he has memorized.
He turns away from the charred hut and trudges toward
the graveyard.
