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Rasheeda Bhagat

A soldier stands guard as people try to salvage belongings from the remains of their houses in Ahmedabad... Yet another period of unrest in the name of religion.

He was a mere 14-year-old Hindu lad who had come to a Muslim mohallah to deliver milk, when the riots broke out in the immediate aftermath of Partition. It was dusk and as the young boy cowered in this little town of Sidhpur in Mehsana district of Gujarat, and wondered how he would get back home, his client, the 65-year-old head of the family comforted him and said, "Come, I will escort you back to your mother and your home." Ignoring the pleadings of his wife, the bearded man and the boy began their journey. The stick-wielding angry mob, just a few yards away from the house, told the old man to hand over the boy. "Just look at what they have done to Muslims all over the place; hand over the boy to us and go back home," they shouted. "Sure, take the boy, but you'll have to kill me first," said the old man, who had for years paid for the education of many a man in the mob.

As he proceeded, way was made for him and the boy who was quaking with fear. The child's mother, a widow, was waiting at the entrance of the Hindu basti tears streaming down her face and fearing the worst had happened to her child. As she embraced her son and fell at the feet of his saviour, this time the Hindu mob asked her to move back and dared the old man to leave the place alive. It was the turn of the woman to dare the mob to kill the man who had saved her only child. The roles were reversed and she led him back to yet another partition that had crept up overnight in this little town.

THE man was my grandfather, and over the decades following Partition, Sidhpur hardly saw any communal riots. Till, that is, the Babri Masjid was razed to the ground in December 1992. A Muslim youth, who had butchered a prominent Hindu leader in the town as riots broke out was handed over to the police by his own father. When the case came up before the court, the murdered man's family, including his widow, told the judge they did not want to press charges and held guilty the madness that had overcome the two communities, and not the Muslim youth.

This gesture once again turned the events, and Muslim and Hindu leaders together singed a declaration that whatever happens elsewhere in the country, they would not hurt each other. For a decade this held good even as Gujarat was rocked many a times by communal violence. Even after the Godhra incident, as anxious Muslims kept calling their families back in Sidhpur, peace prevailed. Until Sunday when curfew had to be imposed following the killing of a senior Muslim lawyer.

As Ahmedabad limps back to normal and efforts are on to douse the flames in the State, the nation is witness to yet another period of lunacy in the name of religion. What happened in Godhra was despicable and now, with every leader of saffron hue demanding that this be condemned first before condemning the carnage that followed,it has become politically correct to follow this sequence. A pity because something which should have been spontaneous now gets slotted in a particular frame of behaviour or speech.

But if we are to carry that same logic forward and move backward, in sequence, then the build up in Ayodhya following the setting of the March 15 deadline by the VHP should never have been allowed to happen. Well before the UP elections, the VHP and its sants had been proclaiming that they had put the Vajpayee Government on notice. They had said: Resolve Ayodhya by mid-March or watch the nation go up in flames because the mandir would be built, come what may.What every ordinary Indian who is not a communal creature and who accepts the centuries-old pluralistic set up would like to ask the rulers in Delhi, mainly the BJP which heads the NDA coalition, is why was this hysteria allowed to build up? Was the BJP leadership so busy trying to keep the egg off its face — it performed miserably in all the four States in the just-concluded Assembly elections — that it had no time to think of the VHP threat?

What the Government has done now by way of virtually sealing off Ayodhya or at least regulating the devotees visiting the town could have been done at least a month ago, as the Chetavani yatra demonstrated that the VHP was in a belligerent mood. Had the Government acted in time, the terrorists would never had an opportunity to burn 57 people alive in Sabarmati Express that fateful day, and Hindutva zealots would not be proclaiming that for every Hindu life lost in that train, 10 or more Muslim lives would be destroyed.

A small correction here; not only lives but whatever economic means the families possessed. Thus, the systematic destruction all over Gujarat. The State which can walk away with the crown when it comes to communal frenzy has seen in the last four days organised crime of a magnitude never experienced before in this country. If the people of Ahmedabad are to be believed, getting a shop first looted and then burnt costs a mere Rs 150. Goons armed with petrol bombs break open shops, take away whatever they can, and then throw the bottles inside, setting the place on fire.

On highways, lorries and other vehicles are stopped, the drivers' licence and the vehicle papers checked for the community that owns them, and then depending on which group is doing the `checking', drivers and/or helpers and/or occupants locked in and burnt alive. That is how Ahsan Jafri, a former Congress MP, and his family were burnt alive. After the first day, the Muslims hit back and the lumpen elements of both the communities tried to outdo the savagery of the other side. Caught in the crossfire are the innocent people of both communities who have lost their homes and means of livelihood. That is, those who have survived.

For the devastated people of Gujarat, particularly the minority community which has been hit that much harder because after all it is a game of numbers, the Chief Minister Mr Narendra Modi's stand that this had to happen after the Godhra incident, is the last straw.

He has argued that considering the "spontaneous outrage" of the people after Godhra, his administration had done an excellent job of containing the carnage. It could have been much worse, he warns.

On camera, police officers admit they were outnumbered. Off the record, and to anguished cries of help from Mulsims, they are reported to have brazenly admitted that their orders were to ignore calls for help.

"When we called for protection, we were told by a senior police officer that their orders are not to rush to help Muslims. They started it, so let them suffer, has been the direction given to them," said a standing government counsel in Ahmedabad, who had to flee for his life and seek shelter, along with his family, in the house of a friend.

"But even here, we have to keep vigil all night, as this too is a Muslim (building) society and we don't know when the mob will come," he adds.

At the centre of all this is Ayodhya. The Ram temple and the Babri Masji have taken enough bhog (sacrifices).

How many more lives will this nation have to lose before our courts or rulers decide which god shall set up his abode and where? No masjid or mandir is worth this price.

Response can be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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