‘We don’t even have Yasmin’s photo’

When she was around seven, Ali Mohammed decided to send her off to his sister Mehmuda in Ode because “there were no good schools for her here in Sokhda”. So ‘Sookhi’, as the gangly Yasmin came to be known, went to school in Ode. “She was a bright child, could write all our names in Gujarati. But destiny had something else in store for her,” says Mehmuda, one of the few Muslims in the Pirawali Bhagol area who survived that March evening.” We don’t even have Yasmin’s photograph to show you,” she says, wiping tears.

“It was a Friday, around 4.30 p.m. The men had gone to the mosque to offer namaz when we heard shouts outside. A huge mob had gathered in our lane and were throwing stones, burning rags and pouches filled with kerosene. There was smoke all around.”

Pirawali Bhagol is a predominantly Hindu part of Ode, dominated by Patels, with only a few Muslim homes. So when the riots began, most of the Muslims took refuge in Jhanpaliwala Ghar, next door to Mehmuda’s.

“We decided to join the others. Since we couldn’t have stepped outside to go across to our neighbour’s house, we went up to the first floor of our house and broke down a part of our mud wall to enter that house. By then, the rioters had locked that house from outside and set fire to it. It was impossible to breathe there,” she says. “I scrambled back to our house with my children Imtiaz and Sartaj. Yasmin was left behind with my in-laws. We survived. All the others who stayed back in the other house were killed. Yasmin too,” she says.

The attack stopped around 6.30 pm. Mehmuda’s husband Majid, who rushed home from the fields when he heard of the attack, was one of the key witnesses in the case when it came up for hearing before a special trial court. After spending a month in a relief camp in neighbouring Bhalej village, the family shifted to Dhunadara village where they had an ancestral home and some land. “We don’t feel like going to Ode now,” says Majid.

In April 2012, a special trial court convicted 23 people and sentenced them to life in prison in the Ode riot case.

Majid lost 16 of his family members in the massacre and got Rs 15 lakh as relief. But Yasmin’s compensation amount lies unclaimed in the district collector’s office. “Though Ali Mohammed and I brought her up, they refused to let us claim the money,” says Majid.

Both Majid and Ali Mohammed are on opposite sides of the political debate. While Majid is a Congress worker, Ali Mohammed says he is with the BJP. But there is one thing they agree on — that Narendra Modi did nothing to stop the riots.

“Yes, Modi could have stopped the riots, but he did not. Still, I am going to vote for him because our sarpanch, Rajubhai Patel, supports us a lot and I will vote for the party Rajubhai votes for. And he is voting for Modi,” says Ali Mohammed, who is a voter in the Vadodara constituency from where Modi is contesting.

“I am voting for the Congress,” says Majid. “Though there is talk of a Modi wave, I believe the Almighty will not let him be the PM.”
Would Yasmin Malek have settled their debate? Hard to say.