Gujarat Muslims fight for rights

WASHINGTON: A US-based organisation says that the Muslims of Gujarat are still suffering persecution and ostracism.

The Indian Muslim Relief and Charities (IMRC) was established by members of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) of the United States in 1981, following riots that had taken place the year before in Jamshedpur, India. MSA Regional Representative Manzoor Ghori and others were anguished by this event and decided to act on their “growing concern for the plight of Indian Muslims since the partition of India in 1947”.

Quoting a recent review of the situation by former Indian civil servant Harsh Mander, IMRC says that “the wounds of the survivors of the Gujarat carnage of 2002 refuse to heal, despite the passage of four years. The predominant terrifying motif of villages that were torn apart by the mass violence of 2002 remains one of settled hate, settled fear and settled despair.”

There are many villages in Gujarat today that have proudly been “cleansed” of their Muslim residents, thus accomplishing the next decisive phase of the “ongoing genocide” which was initiated in the spring of 2002. There are gaily-painted signs at the entrance to some of these villages: Welcome to this Hindu village in the Hindu Rashtra of Gujarat. It is estimated that more than half the affected people are still unable to return to the soil of their homes.

According to Mander, “A number of humiliating conditions are laid down on the internal refugees who long to return home. The first is that they will not pursue legal justice, or give evidence against their tormentors to the police or courts, even if their daughter may have been raped or their parents killed in their presence. Other conditions are that they will live in separate settlements, no one will employ them or trade with them, there should be no sound of the azaan, and so on. The acceptance of these conditions amounts to abject social surrender by an entire community, a forced consent to live as second-class citizens. The fact that thousands are accepting these terms, and that there is little public resistance or outrage in Gujarat or outside it, makes the aftermath of 2002 even more chilling and genocidal.”

Mander writes that in the face of “this colossal degree of State impunity”, the resistance by human rights groups and many who have never engaged in legal justice work in the past, has been “utterly remarkable”, and in the long history of communal violence in India, unprecedented. Most organisations decided to focus all their attention and resources on a few selected “major” test cases, where there was a great deal of loss of life, and to fight these with the best legal talent and considerable resources and efforts for witness protection and support. The outcome of these efforts has been “salutary”. An epic court battle is also being waged involving the people charged under arbitrary emergency laws on the Godhra “conspiracy”, which the Banerjee Commission has conclusively proved never to have occurred.

In September 2004, the Supreme Court ordered the re-examination of the closure without trial of more than 2,000 cases registered after the carnage, and also an inquiry into the appeal of more than 300 cases where the accused have been acquitted. This “opened up the opportunity to secure justice for thousands of survivors”. The state government was recently forced to announce the reopening of a majority of these cases. “The other major challenge is the ongoing social and economic boycott in all villages where people returned after violence, and the hundreds of villages where return is not possible,” Mander writes.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default...-3-2006_pg7_43