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Assalamu'alaiukm
Police took part in slaughter
India's lawmen offered little protection against Hindu gangs massacring
Muslim neighbours
Luke Harding in Ahmedabad
Sunday March 3, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,660969,00.html
In an alley next to her affluent bungalow, Mrs Rochomal's mobile phone was
still ringing yesterday. Her son's jeans were drying on the washing line.
The dishes of her last meal had been carefully stacked, ready to be
washed.
Mrs Rochomal - an elderly Muslim lady - was not in a position to take her
call. Her charred, mutilated corpse lay in the sunny courtyard, framed by
the metal posts of an upturned bed. It was not just the kerosene that had
killed her. The Hindu mob that poured into her home two days ago had
slashed her twice across the face. They had also cut her throat.
A few clues hinted at Mrs Rochomal's final terrifying hours: a small blue
address book was abandoned next to her Nokia cellphone. She clearly knew
what was coming and had been trying to summon help while hiding in her
outside pantry.
The fact that Mrs Rochomal lived 80ft away from a police station reveals a
bleak truth about the violence that has convulsed India over the past four
days: it has been state-sponsored.
The authorities have done little to prevent the inferno that has swept the
western state of Gujarat - not because of incompetence but because they
share the prejudices of the Hindu gangs who have been busy pulping their
Muslim neighbours.
Indian troops yesterday finally took control of the rubble-strewn streets
of Ahmedabad, the state's main city. They took up positions on the edges
of Hindu neighbourhoods. The mood was calmer. But the army's belated
deployment seemed little more than a political calculation that the
Muslims had now got the beating they deserved.
'Everything is finished,' rickshaw driver Narinder Bhai said, gesturing at
the charred interior of his home and his ruined fridge. 'Many people have
been killed here. My wife and children have disappeared. I don't know
where they are.'
Narinder's home is almost next door to Mrs Rochomal's, in the Ahmedabad
district of Naroda, which suffered the worst battering. Hindu mobs armed
with iron bars and machetes burned down the entire colony on Thursday and
Friday.
Yesterday, it was almost completely deserted: a ruin of smouldering
rickshaws, charred family photographs and abandoned homes. 'The crowd was
so big, the officers could not control it,' one policeman said. 'They have
done their job very well.'
The reality is that the police made no effort to hold back the mob, and in
certain places even joined in. 'Several policemen without uniforms started
firing guns at us,' said one Muslim resident, Naseem Aktar, in the suburb
of Bapunagar. 'They killed six or seven people.'
The violence - prompted by last week's gruesome attack on a train carrying
right-wing Hindu activists back from the temple town of Ayodhya - is
clearly an embarrassment for Hindus of moderate views.
In an address to the nation, India's elderly Prime Minister, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, yesterday appealed for peace in his country. But Vajpayee's own
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is part of the problem.
Gujarat is one of the few Indian states still controlled by the BJP. It
has a reputation as a laboratory for Hindu revivalist thinking. Since
sweeping to power in the mid-1990s, the BJP has pursued a communal
pro-Hindu agenda. It has also supported the construction of a temple on
the disputed site in Ayodhya, where Hindu zealots demolished a mosque in
1992. Several members of the present Cabinet, including India's hawkish
Home Minister LK Advani, watched.
The Ayodhya issue now threatens to tear India apart. The extremist Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP) or World Hindu Council has called for construction on
the temple to begin by 15 March. It has so far not been swayed by pleas
from Vajpayee to abandon its plan.
The official death toll since last Wednesday is now 250 - but few dispute
that the real total is vastly higher. The army has restored some order to
Ahmedabad, and the first bulldozers embarked yesterday afternoon on the
epic task of clearing up.
But in the vast countryside around Gujarat, where Hindu and Muslim
villagers live side by side, local massacres were still going on. On the
national highway leading to Bombay, Hindu gangs yesterday manned
roadblocks and set fire to all trucks driven by Muslims.
Last night, meanwhile, Mrs Rochomal still lay face up in front of her
veranda, her gruesome remains a warning to those who survived the flames.
Her white flip-flops were where she had left them, next to the shoe rack
and a brightly-painted swing-seat. Before being murdered, she had
padlocked her front door. The ferocity that killed her left her home
largely untouched. She was clearly a lady of fastidious habits and through
the windows it was possible to make out black-and-white photographs of her
family pinned to the wall.
The Foreign Office confirmed the death of Mohamed Aswat Nallabhai, 41,
from Batley, West Yorkshire, who was attacked on Thursday along with three
relatives while on a social visit to the region.
His group was travelling in a minibus when they were attacked near
Himmatnagar, about 100 miles from Ahmedabad.
Two of the men, named in reports as Saeed Dawood and Shakil Dawood, are
missing.
Ayodhya: India's religious flashpoint
Sectarian tension in Ayodhya dates back to 1528, when the Babri mosque
was built on the site that Hindus claimed their god, Lord Rama, had been
born.
There has been repeated tension over the site ever since. In 1859, the
British administration annexed the mosque, creating within it separate
Muslim and Hindu places of worship. In 1949, the gates were locked after
Muslims claimed Hindu worshippers had placed deities of Lord Rama in their
area.
In 1984, the hardline Vishwa Hindu Parishad party started a campaign to
replace the mosque with a Hindu temple.
In 1992, an angry mob of Hindus stormed the Babri mosque and destroyed
it. Hindus are now pressing to build the temple at the site.
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