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Assalamu'alaikum,
Trapped in House of Fire
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29774-2002Mar2.html>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29774-2002Mar2.html
SARDARPURA, India, March 2 – Carrying wooden sticks and plastic jugs of
kerosene, the mob of 500 Hindus made no secret of its intentions as it
swarmed into this tiny farming town late Friday night. "Kill the Muslims,"
they chanted. "Kill the Muslims."
Trying to flee but surrounded on all sides by the Hindu crowd, most of the
town's Muslims holed up in the one place they believed was safe: a
one-room house with thick concrete walls and metal-barred windows at the
end of their neighborhood.
But the throng soon followed them there and encircled the house. "Get rid
of the Muslims," some of the Hindus said, according to a Hindu man who
witnessed the attack.
Panicked and crying, those inside the house begged for their lives. "We
said, 'Please forgive us. Please let us go,' " said Ruksanabano Ibrahim,
20, who was packed inside with a dozen family members. "We kept saying,
'We are not your enemies. What have we done to you?'‚"
Then, just as it did moments earlier with shops, cars and other homes in
the neighborhood, the mob doused cloth-wrapped sticks with kerosene,
ignited them and hurled them through the windows. The terrorized
occupants, who were locked inside the house, tried in vain to smother the
flames with wool shawls and douse them with bottles of drinking water.
When police officers arrived a half-hour later and broke down the door, 29
people were dead. Most of the 20 others in the house were seriously
burned.
The gruesome attack was the latest in a wave of retaliatory killings by
Hindus that have plunged India's western Gujarat state into anarchy over
the past three days, after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, who had been
rallying to build a temple at the site of a destroyed mosque, was
firebombed by Muslims on Wednesday, killing 58 people. The subsequent
clashes, which have claimed more than 350 lives, are the most severe
religious strife in India in almost a decade.
Although police imposed a curfew in 37 towns and army troops sent to the
state received orders to shoot rioters on sight, the unrest continued
today. In Ahmadabad, which was the scene of brutal slayings and arson
attacks on Thursday and Friday, Hindu gangs set fire to shops in several
Muslim neighborhoods. In the town of Vadodra, police said seven Muslims
working in a bakery were burned alive by a Hindu mob.
Police said more than 120 people were killed Friday in Ahmadabad,
Sardarpura and another village in eastern Gujarat.
Despite fears among some government officials that the fighting would
spread to other cities, most of the violence has been confined to Gujarat,
which has a long history of Hindu-Muslim clashes.
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee delivered a nationally televised
address calling for peace. He said the attacks were "a blot on the
country's face."
About 12 percent of India's 1 billion people are Muslims, while 82 percent
are Hindu. Although India is an officially secular nation, religious
tension between Hindus and Muslims has existed for centuries.
In 1947, when India gained its independence and was partitioned to create
the Muslim nation of Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of people were killed
as they tried to move between the countries. And in 1993, in the last
major round of religious fighting, more than 800 people died in sectarian
riots in Bombay.
While the police and military have increased their presence in large
cities, the revenge attacks appear to be spreading to rural areas like
Sardarpura, where security forces are stretched thin. Local police
officials expressed concern at their ability to stem a wave of vigilante
attacks across the state's farming villages, many of which have small
Muslim enclaves but lack full-time police protection.
In Sardarpura, which has the largest Muslim population in a 30-mile
radius, the violence began on Friday afternoon, when several hundred irate
Hindus arrived from Ghantral, a nearby village. Claiming that two Ghantral
residents were killed aboard the train on Wednesday, the mob used pickaxes
to demolish a light blue mosque on the road into Sardarpura, located about
40 miles north of Ahmadabad.
Forced to disperse from the mosque by police, the Hindus later regrouped
and returned to the village around 9 p.m., police officials said. Once
again, the police pushed them back by firing tear gas canisters, the
officials said.
But then, the 14-man police contingent left the town to patrol neighboring
villages. As soon as they departed, the mob returned – with devastating
consequences.
"We couldn't just stay here," said B.K. Purohit, a police sub-inspector.
"We had to patrol other areas."
After an emergency call from the town, the officers headed back, but said
they were stopped a few miles away by roadblocks.
Muslims who used to live here as well as those in other parts of the state
contend security forces have been slow to respond. In some cases, they
said, police and soldiers simply stood by as women and children were
killed with sticks and swords.
"The police were nowhere to be seen when we were attacked," said Fatima
Bibi, 48, who hid with nine relatives in the home of a Hindu family. "They
should have been protecting us."
As the mob closed in on the Muslim neighborhood, the residents attempted
to defend themselves by throwing stones and brandishing knives, said
Sanju, a Hindu mechanic who witnessed the confrontation. But the Muslims
quickly found themselves outnumbered and were forced to retreat, he said.
Although some Muslims managed either to run away from the village or to
hide in the homes of Hindu families, most made their way down a rutted
dirt path, past burning cars and huts, to the concrete house.
"We thought it would be the safest place because the walls are so thick,"
Ibraham said from her hospital bed today in a nearby city.
But it also was the most crowded. By the time Ibrahim arrived with her
relatives, the small house already was stuffed with people. So when the
mob began throwing flaming sticks through the open windows, setting the
bed and other furniture alight, there was no place to retreat, she said.
"Those who could not move into the corners, they were sucked into the
flames," she said. As new pieces of blazing material were tossed into the
house and flames danced up the walls, Ibrahim and a few others kept moving
around the room, tripping on the bodies of people who had collapsed.
"We were filled with fear," she said. "We were crying, begging them to let
us go."
Ibrahim, who has a large bandage over her right eye, said she lost 10
relatives in the blaze, including her aunt, who owned the house.
Police officers said they removed the 29 badly burned bodies from the
house this morning. By this afternoon, the village was largely abandoned
except for police officers and cows – which fleeing residents had been too
panicked to take – wandering the streets.
Those Muslims who were not taken to the hospital ran off to other
villages, where they planned to move in with relatives. Hindus joined the
exodus out of fear that Muslim gangs might attempt to exact revenge.
Hindus in the area neither praised nor repudiated the attack. A group of
middle-aged Hindu men loitering outside the town said they were
particularly upset by rumors that some of the women and children aboard
the train had been raped.
"They should be punished because they have done awful things to our
people," one man said.
Police officials said they have found no evidence that any of the
passengers were raped. The train was returning from the northern town of
Ayodhya, where hard-line Hindus want to build a temple to the god Ram on
the site of a 16th-century mosque that was razed by Hindus in 1992. A
Hindu group said it plans to start construction of the temple on March 15.
Hindu and Muslim residents said they could not recall another incident of
religious violence in the town, even when the Ayodhya mosque was torn down
and riots engulfed Bombay. "Relations were always very good," said Nasir
Mohammed, a Muslim driver. "Sometimes, we would even go into the homes of
Hindus."
But he and Ibrahim said they can no longer imagine returning to
Sardarpura. Mohammed said he plans to continue living with relatives in a
smaller village 35 miles away. Ibrahim said she has no idea where she will
go after she leaves the hospital, but she said it likely will not be to a
village where Muslims are in the minority.
Analysts said those sentiments suggest that even if government forces
quell the violence, the lingering polarization could set back India's
efforts to foster a multi-religious society.
"In one night, the Hindus ended years of harmony," Ibrahim said. "Why in
the world would anyone want to go back?"
Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report.
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