National

Cry, The Beloved Country

Reflections on the Gujarat massacre by a serving IAS officer.

Harsh Mander
H Updated on: 19 March 2002 12:00 am

Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the terror and
massacre that convulsed the state. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my shoulders
aching with the burdens of guilt and shame.

As you walk through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmedabad, in which an estimated
53,000 women, men, and children are huddled in 29 temporarysettlements, displays of
overt grief are unusual.
People clutch small bundles of relief materials, all that they now own in the world, with
dry and glassy eyes. Some talk in low voices, others busy themselves with the tasksClose
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everyday living in these most basic of shelters, looking for food and milk for children,
tending the wounds of the injured.
But once you sit anywhere in these camps, people begin to speak and their words are like
masses of pus released by slitting large festering wounds. Thehorrors that they speak of
are so macabre, that my pen falters in the writing.
The pitiless brutality against women and small children by organised bands of armed
young men is more savage than anything witnessed in the riots that have shamed this
nation from time to time during the past century.
I force myself to write a small fraction of all that I heard and saw, because it is important
that we all know. Or maybe also because I need to share my own burdens.

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by Taboola

What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spared? Her
assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her foetus and slaughtered it before
her eyes. What can you say about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding theirClose
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with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity?
What can you say? A small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his mother and six
brothers and sisters were battered to death before his eyes. He survived only because he
fell unconscious, and was taken for dead.
A family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements inAhmedabad,
spoke of losing a young woman and her three month old son, because a police constable
directed her to `safety' and she found herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused
her with kerosene and set her and her baby on fire.
I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an
instrument of violence in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat. There are reports every
where of gang-rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their
families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and
in one case with a screw driver.
Women in the Aman Chowk shelter told appalling stories about how armed men disrobed
themselves in front of a group of terrified women to cower them down further. In
Ahmedabad, most people I met - social workers, journalists, survivors -agree that what
Gujarat witnessed was not a riot, but a terrorist attack followed by a systematic, planned
massacre, a pogrom.
Everyone spoke of the pillage and plunder, being organised like a military operation
against an external armed enemy.
An initial truck would arrive broadcasting inflammatory slogans, soon followed by more
trucks which disgorged young men, mostly in khaki shorts and saffron sashes. They were
armed with sophisticated explosive materials, country weapons, daggers and trishuls.
They also carried water bottles, to sustain them in their exertions.
The leaders were seen communicating on mobile telephones from the riot venues,Close Ad
receiving instructions from and reporting back to a co-ordinating centre. Some were seen
with documents and computer sheets listing Muslim families and their properties. They
had detailed precise knowledge about buildings and businesses held by members of the
minority community, such as who were partners say in a restaurant business, or which
Muslim homes had Hindu spouses who should be spared in the violence.
This was not a spontaneous upsurge of mass anger. It was a carefully planned pogrom.
The trucks carried quantities of gas cylinders. Rich Muslim homes and business
establishments were first systematically looted, stripped down ofall their valuables, then
cooking gas was released from cylinders into the buildings for several minutes. Atrained
member of the group then lit the flame which efficiently engulfed the building.
In some cases, acetylene gas which is used for welding steel, was employed to explode
large concrete buildings. Mosques and dargahs were razed, and werereplaced by statues of
Hanuman and saffron flags.
Some dargahs in Ahmedabad city crossings have overnight been demolished and their
sites covered with road building material, and bulldozed so efficiently that these spots are
indistinguishable from the rest of the road. Traffic now plies over these formerdargahs, as
though they never existed.
The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the state police and administrative
machinery is also now widelyacknowledged. The police is known to have misguided
people straight into the hands of rioting mobs. They providedprotective shields to crowds
bent on pillage, arson, rape and murder, and were deaf to the pleas of the desperate
Muslimvictims, many of them women and children.
There have been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the minoritycommunity,
which was the target of most of the mob violence. The large majority of arrests are also
from the same community which was the main victim of the pogrom.
As one who has served in the Indian Administrative Service for over two decades, I feel
great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration.
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The law did not require any of them to await orders from their politicalsupervisors before
they organised the decisive use of force to prevent the brutal escalation of violence, and to
protectvulnerable women and children from the organised, murderous mobs.
The law instead required them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially, decisively, with
courage and compassion. If evenone official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could
have deployed the police forces and called in the army to halt the violence and protect the
people in a matter of hours.
No riot can continue beyond a few hours without the active connivance of the local police
and magistracy. The blood ofhundreds of innocents is on the hands of the police and civil
authorities of Gujarat, and by sharing in a conspiracy of silence,on the entire higher
bureaucracy of the country.
I have heard senior officials blame also the communalism of the policeconstabulary for
their connivance in the violence. This too is a thin and disgraceful alibi. The same forces
have been known toact with impartiality and courage when led by officers of
professionalism and integrity. The failure is clearly of the leadershipof the police and civil
services, not of the subordinate men and women in khaki who are trained to obey their
orders.
Where also, amidst this savagery, injustice, and human suffering is the `civil society', the
Gandhians, the development workers, the NGOs, the fabled spontaneous Gujarathi
philanthropy which was so much in evidence in the earthquake in Kutch andAhmedabad?
The newspapers reported that at the peak of the pogrom, the gates of Sabarmati Asram
were closed to protectits properties, it should instead have been the city's major
sanctuary. WhichGandhian leaders, or NGO managers, staked their lives to halt the death-
dealing throngs? It is one more shame that we as citizens of thiscountry must carry on our
already burdened backs, that the camps for the Muslim riot victims in Ahmedabad are
being run almost exclusively byMuslim organisations. Close Ad

It is as though the monumental pain, loss, betrayal and injustice suffered by the Muslim
people is the concern only of otherMuslim people, and the rest of us have no share in the
responsibility to assuage, to heal and rebuild. The state, which bears theprimary
responsibility to extend both protection and relief to its vulnerable citizens, was nowhere
in evidence in any of thecamps, to manage, organise the security, or even to provide the
resources that are required to feed the tens of thousands ofdefenceless women, men and
children huddled in these camps for safety.
The only passing moments of pride and hope that I experienced in Gujarat, were when I
saw men like Mujid Ahmed andwomen like Roshan Bahen who served in these camps with
tireless, dogged humanism amidst the ruins around them.
In the Aman Chowk camp, women blessed the young band of volunteers who worked from
four in the morning until after midnightto ensure that none of their children went without
food or milk, or that their wounds remained untended. Their leader MujidAhmed is a
graduate, his small chemical dyes factory has been burnt down, but he has had no time to
worry about his ownloss. Each day he has to find 1600 kilograms of foodgrain to feed some
5000 people who have taken shelter in the camp.
The challenge is even greater for Roshan Bahen, almost 60, who wipes her eyes each time
she hears the storiesof horror by the residents in Juapara camp. But she too has no time
for the luxuries of grief or anger. She barely sleeps, as her volunteers, mainly working class
Muslim women and men from the humble tenements around the camp, provide
temporary toilets, food and solace to the hundreds who have gathered in the grounds of a
primary school to escape the ferocity of merciless mobs.
As I walked through the camps, I wondered what Gandhiji would have done in these dark
hours. I recall the story of the Calcutta riots, when Gandhi was fasting for peace. A Hindu
man came to him, to speak of his young boy who had been killed by Muslim mobs, and of
the depth of his anger and longing for revenge. And Gandhi is said to have replied: If you
really wish to overcome your pain, find a young boy, just as young as your son, a Muslim
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boy whose parents have been killed by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy like you would your
own son, but bring him up with the Muslim faith to which he was born. Only then will you
find that you can heal your pain, your anger, and your longing for retribution.
There are no voices like Gandhi's that we hear today. Only discourses on Newtonian
physics, to justify vengeance oninnocents. We need to find these voices within our own
hearts, we need to believe enough in justice, love, tolerance. There is much that the
murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me.
One of them is a song I often sang with pride and conviction. The words of the song are:
Sare jahan se achha Hindustan hamara…

It is a song I will never be able to sing again.

(Harsh Mander is a serving IAS Officer, who is working on deputation with a
developmentorganisation, Action Aid)

Also See: Interview with Harsh Mander

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