Journalism of Courage
THE scar on his chest is smooth and tender. “See, this is what I have to see everyday. It will stay with me till I am buried,” says Raja Qureshi. There are other scars that have stayed with him since that morning on February 28, 2002 — images of his mother and sister being hacked to death, the rioter who lunged at him, the cold knife against his chest, and a mad scramble over a neighbour’s wall as he fled for his life. Raja was then 11. Now 23 and voting in his first election, he wants the scars of Naroda Patiya to stay with him more than ever before.
“I didn’t vote the last election because I hated politicians. This time, I am voting to bring power to the common man,” says Raja, sitting on the edge of the bed in his sister’s two-room house in Naroda Patiya.
That morning, as he and his five elder siblings lay sleeping till late, his mother Zarina Begum had come rushing into their room, yelling and screaming, shaking them violently, asking them to run.
His father, Bundu Qureshi, a textile mill worker, had been away at work. Seconds later, a mob barged in. As Raja ran, he caught a glimpse of his mother being hacked and set on fire. As Raja ran towards friend Rajvir’s house, a “big man” came running towards him and slashed his chest with a knife. Someone in the mob asked the man to spare the child, but the attacker had said, ‘Yeh Musalman kal jaakar hum logon ko wapas maarega (They will attack us tomorrow)’. “That line still haunts me,” says Raja.
The boy, bleeding and scared, managed to free himself. He scaled a wall and jumped into the camp of the State Reserve Police Force adjoining Naroda Patiya from where he fled to friend Rajvir’s home.
“I survived because a Hindu saved me. Rajvir’s mother hid me inside their store room. Later, she bathed me, gave me first aid and fed me. I survived.”
He later moved to the Shahibaug relief camp in old Ahmedabad and remembers crying for a week before his father and sister Shabana tracked him down and he shifted with them to the Shah-e-Alam relief camp in the city. The family stayed there for six months before returning to Naroda Patiya.
Raja was among the riot victims who travelled to New Delhi in 2002 to depose before Justice J S Verma of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). Raja’s testimony was the only one by a minor.
“When I was taken to New Delhi from the relief camp, they asked me to narrate everything, give names of the attackers, and details of deaths and losses. I told them that my mother and sister were cut into pieces by a few men who lived right next door. I saw saffron-clad men pulling women out by their hair and one of them was my ammi,” he says.
After the riots, his father sent him to Raigad in Maharashtra, where his uncle enrolled him in an English-medium school. Two years later, he was back in Naroda where he went to a municipal school. But he says he dropped out soon after to earn for his sister Shabana’s wedding. He did a few odd jobs, working at foundries and auto workshops. He now learns stitching at a textile unit in Naroda. “Some day, I will start my own textile business,” he says in English. It’s a language he uses sparingly and haltingly — to voice his aspiration and to send text messages on WhatsApp.
In the years after the riots, the family disintegrated. Raja is not on good terms with his father and his two elder brothers — one, a scrap dealer and the other an autorickshaw driver. His sister Shabana, with whose family Raja lives in Naroda Patiya, says the riots changed her “little brother”. As a boy, she says, Raja was talkative, mischievous, stubborn and aggressive. He hardly talks now, is reserved, suspicious and has bouts of depression.
As Shabana packs his lunch, a flash of Narendra Modi on TV gets Raja agitated. “This is a hoax. Muslims in India, and even Hindus, will not forgive him for the deaths of their own people in Gujarat. He (Modi) may be unstoppable but God is the ultimate judge. Whenever I see Modi masks, I feel the killers are still around.”
