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Gujarat Update

August 22, 2002

A deceptively reassuring silence marks American news coverage of the situation in Gujarat, India, after the onset of anti-Muslim riots there on February 28. Except for a couple of articles in the New York Times, the major media have said little during recent months about the aftermath of violence by Hindu fundamentalist gangs who swept through the Muslim areas of Gujarat state, raping and killing residents and burning and looting their houses and shops. The nominal cause of the riots was another violent act, a day earlier, when a Muslim mob in the Godhra railroad station burned a train containing Hindus, some of whom had been harassing the Muslim passengers. Some 58 Hindus died. The Hindu extremists' response was a carefully planned and executed operation that killed at least 1000 Muslims if you accept the government's estimate and more than 2000 by most other estimates. It also drove hundreds of thousands of Muslims (and some Hindus swept up in the mayhem) out of their homes and into makeshift camps lacking shelter, facilities, and services, and devastated the Gujarati economy. Unimaginable suffering has resulted.

Readers who assume that "no news is good news" will be surprised to learn that the violence continues, that thousands of residents are confined to relief camps as refugees in their own country, with little prospect of returning to their homes (which may have been burned down anyway), and that mounting evidence links the government with the perpetrators of the violence. The continued killings and unrest, coupled with government inaction and obstruction, have forced Gujarat's struggle groups—many of whom receive support from the UU Holdeen India Program—to completely reorient their activities toward helping the victims survive and try to rebuild their lives. Those Indians, both in India and abroad, who believe in the secular state now worry that religion may become a defining element of nationality, with grave consequences for the one-fifth of Indians who are not Hindu.

A Challenge to the Gandhi Heritage

The riots are an expression of a long-standing campaign by fundamentalists to change India from a secular to a Hindu religious state. At the time of independence in 1947, Gandhi's vision of a secular state that embraced all Indians triumphed, yet a minority view persisted in favor of an overtly Hindu-based nation. The minority view has been gaining adherents in recent decades, under the banners of local and regional parties and organizations and with the leadership of a national party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP leads the national government in a shaky coalition, and Gujarat's Chief Minister at the time of the riots, Narendra Modi, was a BJP member—in fact the only BJP politician to lead a state government.

Extremists from the BJP and kindred organizations have not shied away from condoning violent means to accomplish their goal. In 1992, fundamentalist mobs burned down the Babri Mosque, a Muslim holy place, and declared they would replace it with a Hindu temple to Ram—something that the BJP-dominated national government now realizes it cannot allow without potentially catastrophic repercussions. Several grassroots organizations of fundamentalists are entrenched and very active in Gujarat, where they propagate a message of intolerance against all non-Hindus. Their message is basically that since most Indians are Hindus, India should become an avowedly Hindu nation. The simplistic call to religious nationalism has touched off major outbursts against Muslims in 1992 and 1993 and against Christians on many occasions since 1998.

The state government has effectively protected the murderous gangs who roamed Gujarat this spring by refusing to pursue serious criminal investigations. Chief Minister Modi has even tried to take advantage of the situation by dissolving the state government and calling for new state elections, in order to cash in on the perceived popularity from its fundamentalist stance. If the elections are held in the fall as expected, I will be able to see conditions there first-hand during my visit to Gujarat.

Our Partners Respond

All ten of the UU Holdeen India Program's Gujarat partners have been deeply involved in responding to the ghastly horrors and destruction of the riots. I will focus on the efforts of two partners, the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) and Developing Initiatives for Social and Human Action (DISHA). They began providing relief well before the government responded, and they have continued to help victims, including many of those in emergency camps, despite harassment from gangs and frequent obstruction or indifference from the government. Preventing violence and aiding the victims have become consuming efforts, testing our partners severely as they attempt to cope with a human disaster that affects millions of people.

The riots erupted approximately a year after another disaster in Gujarat, a major earthquake in January 2001 that brought an outpouring of government and international aid. Hardly had the temblors stopped than our partner organizations mobilized their members and began relief and rebuilding efforts. After a year of strenuous efforts they were beginning to catch their breath when, on Feb. 28, 2002, fundamentalist gangs appeared in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods of Ahmedabad, Gujarat's largest city, and began killing, burning, and looting. The violence soon spread to surrounding villages in the countryside.

After the immediate shock wore off, our partners in Gujarat began organizing a constructive response. SEWA has some 400,000 Hindu and Muslim members in Gujarat, poor working women whose firsthand experience of hardship and injustice has steeled them against disasters like earthquakes and riots. Most of DISHA's 80,000 members are tribals—indigenous peoples who are among India's poorest and most disadvantaged citizens. Like all of our partners, SEWA and DISHA are democratic, self-help organizations that provide a mechanism through which members can act in common and thus multiply their strength.

As soon as they could get curfew passes (about three days after the worst rioting had ended), staff members began visiting the most affected areas and making contact with colleagues. They found whole neighborhoods burned to blackened ruins. DISHA's initial reports speak of total devastation in some villages. In the Muslim hamlet of Paniya, mobs looted and burned all 14 houses and even cut down the fruit trees. In Bandibar, a fundamentalist gang burned one resident alive, killed another outright, and injured three more, while destroying 26 houses. In another village, Hindus lost their homes when flames from burning Muslim houses spread to theirs. Desperate to flee the killers, the residents left their villages in search of safe havens, and within a few days began appearing at the emergency relief camps. In eastern Gujarat, some fled to the neighboring state of Rajasthan, where they were accommodated at a secure government camp and even had a visit from the head of the state government (in contrast to the situation in Gujarat, where the Chief Minister remained aloof and unsympathetic to the victims).

The riots hurt the very poor disproportionately. They lost family members, lacked savings to fall back on, and in many cases were forced to enter camps where they had no way to make a living. On March 6, SEWA began sending mixed teams of Hindu and Muslim women, bringing food to five of the relief camps that held nearly 22,000 SEWA members, while outside of the camps other teams assisted another 17,000 members. The actual numbers helped were much greater because SEWA did not distinguish between members and non-members in the camps. A garment worker named Kulsumbibi greeted one SEWA relief team with a despairing wave of the hand, saying "Look how the mobs have destroyed my home." Then she seemed to take heart and told them, "But when I saw you, I knew that my SEWA family was with me. It brought back the will to survive."

The DISHA workers found that very simple things, like tarpaulins, were vital for the camp inmates, who had literally no shelter from the monsoon rains nor any utensils for cooking. Then, in succeeding days, as Red Cross and government assistance began arriving, teams began shifting their focus from food and water to restoration of livelihoods, health, and childcare.

SEWA's teams had already been through the earthquake disaster, so they understood the importance of helping victims not only resume "normal" life but also find gainful work. Realizing that each woman who began working was a center of support for a whole family, SEWA quickly began assembling the various elements of livelihood. All told, SEWA helped some 21,400 of its members resume working in the camps. At first, women were paid to make items needed in the camps, such as clothing, bags, cigarettes, and mattresses. Then SEWA began marketing the goods outside the camps, including the United States, where a delegation of SEWA craftswomen exhibited and sold their wares at the Smithsonian's annual Folk Festival on the Mall in Washington. Possibly some of you visiting Washington during late June and early July had the opportunity to speak with the craftswomen at their stalls and buy their beautiful scarves, table and bed linens, bags, and other items. Members of the Cedar Lane UU Church in Bethesda, Maryland, bought more than $1500 worth of SEWA's textiles after I spoke with them about the riots.

DISHA likewise helped victims resume their livelihoods, by seeking out sewing machines for women and through the distribution of tool kits for the major trades—masons, carpenters, and ironsmiths. One Muslim recipient remarked that the mason's tools would enable him to actually upgrade his position from construction worker to skilled mason. He will certainly have plenty of work as the rebuilding efforts begin to gather momentum.

Camp inmates also needed health and child care. Aside from the wounds suffered in the riots, many victims required treatment for chronic or acute health conditions. In the camps, SEWA arranged for a gynecologist and a pediatrician to examine women and children and to take seriously ill people to local hospitals. At one rural camp (Ismailnagar), the SEWA staff attended to some 1100 children. Infants and young children received food at centers staffed by teachers and others. Older children, many traumatized by what they had seen or experienced during the riots, were placed in programs aimed at helping them express their fear and anger in constructive ways; the program now collaborates with the state government's Integrated Child Development Scheme. The childcare services are vital for the children, but also for their parents, who have gained free time to begin rebuilding their livelihoods.

The efforts of SEWA and DISHA have been crucial to the survival of thousands of people, and they continue today. But they were and are constrained by daunting hurdles, including threats and intimidation from extremists and even, it is claimed by one carefully documented report, from representatives of the state government. Still, enough stability has returned so that victims, and indeed all Indians, can begin to think about the future.

The Coming Months

The big issue now is whether the people of Gujarat can live together in peace. The signs are, unfortunately, very mixed. On the plus side, many parts of Gujarat did not experience violence, even in areas with interspersed Hindu and Muslim communities. Stories have emerged of local leaders cooperating to prevent violence and maintain the peace. It is also encouraging that our partners, especially SEWA, have been able to begin the process of collaborating with government agencies, whenever possible, to bring aid to victims and start the rebuilding process. Finally, public opinion polls show that most Indians are appalled by what happened.

On the minus side, the state government has denied any complicity in the violence, despite a mounting body of evidence to the contrary. The recent nuclear war scare with Pakistan has drained media attention away from Gujarat and may possibly enable the government to escape a full investigation, in which case justice will definitely not be served and the extremist gangs may conclude that they can act with impunity as long as they don't raise too much attention.

The most significant adverse development, however, may be the continued efforts by Hindu extremist groups to rule the countryside by setting communities against each other. The BJP has begun courting the tribals—who live outside the Hindu caste system—with the message that they can have a place in the "true India" if they adjust their values in the right direction. Some tribals did join the recent violence, although to their credit they attacked property rather than people. Extremists have also been trying to establish relations with the dalits, or untouchables, many of whom are Christian. Such efforts have not succeeded with members of our partner organizations, but they are making inroads among others.

World opinion has taken notice of the many credible charges that the Gujarat government and elements of the police either condoned the violence and/or actually participated in it. The state's complicity in violence against citizens is contrary to basic human values, the Indian constitution, and a host of international treaties that India has ratified. In an effort to publicize these concerns and examine the evidence, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom held a hearing in Washington on June 10th. Indian and non-Indian journalists, scholars, and other experts described events in Gujarat, some from firsthand experience, and made suggestions about an official American response. One expert emphasized the need to investigate the flow of money to Hindu extremist organizations from Indians living in the U.S., and argued that the government has on previous occasions banned fundraising by foreign organizations that advocate violence and intolerance. Unfortunately, the U.S. government remains one of the few nations that has failed to condemn the Gujarat government and the Indian government for their roles in the riots.

In the final analysis, however, the residents of the affected areas are the ones who must make peace work. And they know this. A recent SEWA report describing the riots and the relief efforts concludes, "The real task for tomorrow is the rehabilitation of 'hearts and minds,' of getting people to live and work together in the same occupations and to study together in the same schools... That is the India to which we belong. That is our tomorrow."

This noble vision will be sorely tested in the coming months and years. You can imagine how difficult it is for our Indian partners, committed as they are to the secular ideal of Gandhi and his successors, to deal constantly with deeply prejudiced government officials. The state government has moved slowly, reluctantly, to secure decent living conditions in the refugee camps, provide security for those seeking to return home, offer compensation to victims, and prosecute the evildoers. Far from acknowledging their role in condoning and even participating in the violence, the authorities are engaged in a huge cover-up. They must be thrilled that the U.S. media are giving this story so little coverage.

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Last updated on Thursday, June 3, 2010.

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