The Gujarat Massacre, 2002
On February 27, 2002, 59 people were killed in a fire on board a train in the Indian state of Gujarat. Many passengers on the train were Hindu-right militants returning from an anti-Muslim rally in Ayodhya. Some of these militants had been harassing Muslim vendors and passengers at the station in the town of Godhra some fifteen minutes earlier. A teenage Muslim girl who had been briefly pulled away from her mother was rumored to have been taken on board. Shortly after the train pulled out it made an unexplained emergency stop in front of a Muslim slum. A mob of up to a thousand Muslims gathered to throw stones at the train. A few minutes later one of the coaches went up in flames. Fifty-eight helpless passengers--20 men, 26 women, and 12 children--were burned alive, and one more later died in a hospital.
Circumstantial evidence looks strong that people in the mob set the fire, and if so it was an atrocious and indefensible communalist crime. At the same time, despite 131 people having been charged under conspiracy laws in the course of a more than three-year-long investigation, the police have not been able to explain how the fire might have been set in a way that fits the eyewitness testimony and the physical evidence. Some believe it may have been an accident.
The Hindu-right Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and its militant youth wing, the Bajrang Dal--in connivance with the fraternally allied BJP government of Gujarat--used the pretext of avenging those killed at Godhra to launch a paramilitary assault on the entire Muslim population of the state. Over 2000 people were killed, tens of thousands maimed, hundreds raped or sexually tortured, and as many as 100,000 made homeless in waves of massacres and demolitions over the following days and weeks. These attacks were clearly the result of systematic, detailed, military-style planning done at least months in advance (possibly in anticipation of riots triggered by the campaign in Ayodhya). The gangs of young men who took part in them, many of them wearing saffron headbands and chanting obscene chauvinist slogans, were lavishly equipped with vehicles, mobile phones, and arsenals of weapons--including stockpiles of municipal gas cylinders that are only available through the state. The gangs were led by Hindu-right cadre carrying computer printouts listing Muslim homes and businesses, which were burned and demolished while Hindu-owned buildings next door were left untouched. Far from being collateral, this massive property damage was an attempt to uproot and economically sabotage the community. And all of this was carried out with the open complicity, assistance, and in many cases participation of state officials and the police.
This state-sponsored mass murder is a model for the genocide of Muslims and other religious minorities the Hindu right would like to carry out across the subcontinent. Ashok Singhal, the international president of the VHP, has called it “a successful experiment, which will be repeated all over the country now.”
On the other side, jihadist Muslim groups have killed or wounded hundreds in several indiscriminate terrorist attacks to supposedly avenge the massacre. Aside from these, the many cases of local, small-scale communalist retaliation by Gujarati Muslims have almost all been aimed at Hindu untouchables, who were prominent in the pogromist gangs. The working class should condemn communalist violence on all sides. |
