4 min readJan 8, 2003 12:00 AM IST
First published on: Jan 8, 2003 at 12:00 AM IST
Instead of going to Goa for the New Year, I wish Prime Minister Vajpayee had come to Pandarwada. Here, and in other villages in Gujarat’s Panchmahals district, he would have seen the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s ‘Hindutva’ and ‘Hindu Rashtra’ in action.
When I first met Muslims from Pandarwada nine months ago, they were huddled in camps, still numbed by the killing of relatives. They had been betrayed by some of their neighbours — one man offered sanctuary to several men in his fields and then signalled to the mobs to get them; another told them to hide in an abandoned house and then opened the roof tiles and poured acid in.
Today, Pandarwada’s Muslims are trying to live with these deep divides, gingerly conversing with their old neighbours, stoically pretending an economic boycott does not exist — and that the murderers they see roaming free are going to behave themselves in future.
Even before Modi’s re-election, the case against the killers had been closed. The manner in which the police recorded FIRs — and the transformation of the public prosecutor into an additional lawyer for the defence — saw to this. Less than one-fourth the initial population of Muslims has gone back to live in the village. They are currently housed in tents, while their houses are being rebuilt by the Islamic Relief Committee.
Compared to the aftermath of the earthquake, the absence of any secular effort at reconstruction and rehabilitation is striking. After much effort by camp organisers and others, those who lost relatives have got ‘compensation’ cheques, but money for those badly disabled is lost between buck-passing by the hospital and the police. Because of the drought this year, the destruction of their few diesel pumps and the loss of cattle to the rioters, Muslims have not been able to grow anything on their lands. The government has not started any relief works, and there has been no compensation for destroyed businesses. Relief rations lasted only six months, and now there is little food to eat.
Initially even drinking water was a problem because the hand pumps in the Muslim basti were all broken. The Islamic Relief Committee later provided a bore pump. High school kids hang about doing nothing because their names were taken off the rolls while they were away for four months in the camps. A few go to school in Lunawada, where the Muslim community and the Guild Service Society run a home for widows and small children.
The story is depressingly familiar in village after village. In Malwan, where a sign at the entrance announces ‘Mahan Hindu Rashtra Malwannagar’, the Muslims are reluctant to talk. This is a ‘compro’ village where the names of the accused have been dropped. In Anjanwa, the Muslims come and go, unwilling to abandon their fields completely but still too scared to come and live.
Out of 26 accused, the police has been unable to catch 18. Their excuse is that whenever they come to the village the men escape to the jungles. Curiously, though, we were able to meet at least two of these accused in our 10-minute sojourn in the village. Last month, Vajpayee shocked the country by his unfounded attack on all Muslims for allegedly not showing remorse over Godhra. Had he come to Pandarwada or Anjanwa, he would have found little remorse amongst some of the ‘Hindu’ men who had killed little children and burnt old people, people whom they had known all their lives. In any case, the issue for a prime minister should not be whether the perpetrators show remorse, but whether the state can deliver justice. And this, certainly, has not happened so far.
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