Now they want life back on track

On the main door of the Panchal sisters’ house are lurid VHP stickers of the burning S-6 carriage of the Sabarmati Express saying &#145...

On the main door of the Panchal sisters’ house are lurid VHP stickers of the burning S-6 carriage of the Sabarmati Express saying ‘‘Don’t Vote for Terror’’. But the girls won’t even talk about it for they, like other families of Ramol touched by the Godhra carnage, are busy getting their lives back on track. Eleven people from this labour area had died in the train attack.

‘‘It’s been a bad year, and we have no words to describe what we have gone through,’’ says 20-year-old Komal, the eldest, who now takes care of three younger sisters. She may well be speaking for all the Ramol families. The Panchal girls lost their parents, Harshadbhai and Nitaben, and two elder sisters, Pratiksha and Chhaya, in the carnage.

Only four depose before panel

NADIAD: In its first sitting outside Ahmedabad, the two-judge commission waited the whole of Wednesday to take submissions from riot-affected in Kheda district but only four persons turned up to depose at the Madiad Collectorate. The venue, however, did see a battery of police personnel and curious onlookers gathering there. (ENS)

Dr Girish Raval, 83, who lives in Ramol, can understand their plight. He lost his wife Sudha and son Ashwin in the riots. Raval lives with his granddaughter Kushbu, who is to appear for the HSC board exams this year. ‘‘My dad died fighting for Hindutva and left us nothing but suffering,’’ she says.

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Bharat Panchal, an auto-rickshaw driver who lost his wife in the carnage, doesn’t feel such strong anti-VHP sentiments. But he puts things in perspective: ‘‘I cannot change my Hindutva beliefs and am still a VHP member, but I have Muslim friends too.’’

At the Chaudagar and the Mhatre homes, too, the focus is on putting the tragedy behind. Prakash Chaudagar, who lost his wife Ami, says, ‘‘What happened at Godhra was unfortunate, but then what can be done about it?’’

All these families, though, display laminated pictures given out by the VHP, showing the victim in one panel and Lord Ram in the adjacent one.