- 16 Sep 2012
- Hindustan Times (Mumbai)
- Sumana Ramanan sumana.ramanan@hindustantimes.
com
Two weeks after a historic judgement convicting 32 people of murder in
Ahmedabad’s Naroda Patiya, its consequences are being felt in and around the
site of the worst rioting in Gujarat in 2002
The judgement may have jolted some god-fearing people among
the Gujarati middle classes, but mainly among the older generation.
ACHYUT YAGNIK
author and activist
author and activist
Amina Abbas, 50, has often seen Narendra Modi’s cavalcade
pass the road in front of her home in Ahmedabad’s Naroda Patiya. Each time, she
feels a mixture of anger, fear and hopelessness — anger that the Gujarat chief
minister never once visited her largely working-class Muslim colony, the site
of the worst violence in riots that convulsed the state in 2002; fear that the
mobs that set houses on fire and killed more than 90 people will return; and
hopelessness about her future in the city. “Wherever there is a calamity,
leaders are supposed to go,” she said in Hindi, standing outside the community
mosque, on September 11, the day that Modi set off on his Vivekananda Yuva
Vikas Yatra from Bahucharaji, a Hindu pilgrimage town in Mehsana district in
north Gujarat, launching his campaign for the state assembly election due in
December. “But he did not even make a pretence of commiserating with us.”
Clearly among the locality’s more articulate and fearless residents, she was
the first to come forward from among a cluster of people, mostly men, sitting
and standing around the mosque. At the end of August, when she heard on TV that
a special court had convicted 32 people for murder and rioting in her locality,
she felt a measure of satisfaction ( see panel
‘Three key judgements’). Most of the convicts are from neighbouring
settlements — either Chharas, classified as a criminal tribe by the British, or
Sindhis, from families that were refugees of Partition, including the area’s
MLA, Mayaben Kodnani, a former state minister and a doctor who ran a clinic in
the area.
Historic in India for its conviction of not just the foot soldiers of a riot
but also the generals orchestrating it, the judgement's effects are gradually
rippling through communities connected with the worst brutality of 2002.
“It partly restored our faith in the law,” said Amina, whose immediate
family, her husband and two sons, escaped the violence, but whose home was
looted. “Innocents — poor, vulnerable people — were murdered and raped. Our
homes and livelihoods were destroyed. What has the Gujarat government done to
help us rebuild our lives?”
Amina stopped working on February 28, 2002, the day the mobs came. She had a
job in the neighbouring Hindu area of Chiloda, in a press that prints
examination papers; she had the responsibility of ensuring employees did not
leave the premises with copies. “I am too afraid to work in a Hindu area,” she
said, adding that she planned to move soon to Bhiwandi, a Muslim-majority
textile town 20 kilometres northeast of Mumbai, where she has relatives. Said
her husband Abbas, 65, a retired mill worker: “Muslim votes make no difference
to Narendra Modi.” But Amina has no faith in the Congress either. “It did
nothing during the riots or afterwards,” she said.
In the nearby Chhara settlement, about a dozen of whose residents have been
convicted, Chetna Rathod, 29, and Ankur Garange, 24, are two prominent,
educated youngsters. They weren’t keen on being photographed but talked freely
about the judgement, sitting in the Chhara community centre, whose streetfacing
façade, with its bright handprints made with paint catches the eye amidst the
area’s unrelenting hodgepodge of low-flung tenements lining narrow,
slush-filled lanes. On the door hangs a board: Budhan Theatre. Inside, against
three walls are eight steel cupboards, stacked with mostly English books, a
surprisingly high-brow and eclectic collection, including Rabbit at Rest by
John Updike and Walter Laqueur’s Europe in Our Time. In an open yard behind the
room, a man is selling plastic pouches of what is apparently country liquor;
several youngsters are sitting on wooden benches, drinking.
“Traditionally, the community made a living through thievery and brewing
liquor,” said Rathod in Hindi. “But we are trying to change things.” Founded in
1998 with the help of writer and activist Mahasweta Devi and academic-activist
Ganesh Devy, the centre aims to channel young people’s energies into reading
and theatre and bring about communal harmony, she said. After the 2002 riots,
the group ran workshops for Muslim children in Patiya who had seen their
parents being killed, said Garange.
As a youngster, however, Garange regularly attended programmes run by the
local Rashtriya Swayamsevek Sangh branch, at a cricket ground nearby. “I even
wore khaki pants,” he recalled. “They told us that we were Hindus, that Muslims
were our enemies. They taught us inflammatory songs. But they didn’t succeed
because our experience with Muslims has been good.”
Just the previous day, Achyut Yagnik, the author of several books on Gujarat
and the founder of the Ahmedabad-based non-profit group, Centre for Social
Knowledge and Action, had said that for two decades the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) had been wooing an emerging class of urban, educated Dalits and backward
castes, some of whom were attracted to Hindutva as a resolution of their
identity crisis. Some Chharas continue to attend the Sangh’s programmes, said
Rathod, adding that Babu Bajrangi’s home was a five-minute walk from the
centre, by way of emphasising Hindu fundamentalism’s hold on parts of the
locality. Bajrangi, a former leader of the extremist Bajrang Dal, was convicted
last month, along with Kodnani. Yet Rathod found it hard to believe that so
many Chharas had been found guilty of murder. “Chharas are often involved in
property-related crimes,” she said candidly. “But according to our customs, you
cannot kill.”
“I was young when the riots took place, but I’ve heard about the atrocities,
and I’m glad some people have been punished,” said Garange. “But you can’t say
anything about Modi in Gujarat. The rich support him. He will come back to
power.”
On the other side of Patiya lies the lower-middle-class Sindhi locality of
Kuber Nagar. On a stretch facing the main road are a row of dispensaries. One
of them, as the Gujarati sign indicated, belongs to Mayaben Kodnani. When asked
when she last came there, a man at a counter outside shrugged and turned away,
discouraging further conversation. A woman inside claimed she had sold it six
months ago. Two doors away a sign read ‘Surendra Kodnani’, Mayaben’s husband.
At 9 am, his clinic was closed. A man in a saffron robe sitting on the stoop
outside said the compounder would open it after an hour. Deeper inside Kuber
Nagar, a man on a bicycle stopped, eager to talk. A retired public prosecutor
at the chief metropolitan magistrate’s court, he identified himself as NS
Saini. “The Naroda verdict is unprecedented in Gujarat,” he said in English.
“Convictions act as a great deterrent. But they will probably have no effect on
Modi’s prospects in the election. He has charisma.” He directed us to the Apna
Ghar colony nearby, where he said the families of some of the Sindhi convicts
lived.
In this colony, people peeped out, but few wished to speak. One man finally
ventured out, but would reveal only his first name — Anil. He said he did not
know much, including whether any of the convicts lived there. An elderly woman
also tentatively stepped out. “Yes, I saw Mayaben and others being arrested, on
TV, but I know nothing else,” she said in Hindi before ducking back inside.
Several activists, such as Gautam Thaker, the Gujarat general secretary of the
People's Union for Civil Liberties, said the Sindhis may have clammed up
because they were angry with Modi for having forsaken them. “Besides those
convicted, many others are also still fighting cases against them,” he said.
Several kilometres away, in Ahmedabad’s upper middle-class Shahibagh area,
in Om Towers, where Kodnani lived on the 10th floor, people were more
forthcoming. The building’s supervisor, Atmaram Parmar, 62, said she had been
an upright resident. “I liked her,” he said. “She was from the BJP, which I
support. Modi’s work is good. He is a good person.”
“What happened with Mayaben, it’s wrong,” said Neeraj Jain, 28, a textile
merchant, attracted by the gathering crowd. “She’s a respectable doctor. She
could not have done all those things. She has been framed.” An older man,
cradling an infant, nodded vigorously. “The riots were a spontaneous reaction
to what happened at Godhra,” he said, referring to the torching of a
compartment of the Sabarmati Express on February 27, 2002, largely carrying
Hindutva activists returning from Ayodhya. He did not want to reveal his name.
Jain and Parmar are members of Gujarat’s growing urban and urbanised middle
class, the vast majority of whom Yagnik had said still staunchly supported
Modi, especially youngsters. “My business has prospered during his rule,” said
Jain. “Gujarat hasn’t had a riot in the past decade. Modi is India’s best chief
minister.” Just then, his father walked by, asked him whom he was talking to
and frisked him away.
Four days later, Modi’s yatra had reached Navsari district
in south Gujarat. By then, Amina Abbas had also moved south, to Bhiwandi,
unsure about when she would return to Naroda Patiya. “I am waiting to see,” she
said over the phone, “whether or not those above Mayaben and the convicts come
to their rescue.”
