[There is
nothing new about religious violence in India , or the malignant, slow-moving changes that follow in its
wake. Though riots here generally last a few days, coming to a halt when the
police arrive in force, by that time they have already altered the social
fabric, injecting suspicion and paranoia into regions where religious groups
once mixed freely. In the western state of Gujarat , more
than 20,000 Muslims who fled during the riots of 2002 were still living in
relief camps 10 years later, according to Amnesty International.]
By Ellen
Barry and Betwa
Sharma
 |
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
People demanded food at one of the camps in the district
of Muzaffarnagar, which has now been closed.
|
They try to coax him, reminding him that Hindu and Muslim
families lived together in his village for generations before September, when a
two-day spasm of religious violence engulfed the area, sending about 50,000
people fleeing from their homes.
Four months later, an estimated 15,000 Muslims remain in
sprawling makeshift tent cities in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh,
refusing to believe it is safe to return. In deepening cold, family members
slept clinging to one another for warmth while icy water dripped through the
tarps overhead. By mid-December, according to the government, 35 children in
the camps had died.
Stung by negative publicity, local officials have
undertaken a new push to clear the camps. This week, Mr. Akhtar stood in the
middle of a field of empty foundations in the village
of Loi
But he, like thousands of his neighbors, said he would
still refuse to return home.
“Look, they come to us and say, ‘Please come back, it’s our
responsibility to make sure you’re safe,' ” said Mr. Akhtar, 40, a construction
worker whose bare feet, clad in rubber slippers, were chalky and deeply
cracked. “We don’t believe them. Where was their responsibility when we were
being attacked? We were trying to call people for help, but the police had
their phone switched off.”
There is nothing new about religious violence in India , or the malignant, slow-moving changes that follow in its
wake. Though riots here generally last a few days, coming to a halt when the
police arrive in force, by that time they have already altered the social
fabric, injecting suspicion and paranoia into regions where religious groups
once mixed freely. In the western state of Gujarat , more
than 20,000 Muslims who fled during the riots of 2002 were still living in
relief camps 10 years later, according to Amnesty International.
The divisions are made worse by the miserable conditions
that often await those who flee.
Over the years, India has managed to provide adequate relief for survivors of
natural disasters, but not for riot victims — at different points they have
been Muslims, Hindu Pandits and Sikhs — in large part because it is politically
risky to take sides in such a conflict, critics say.
But this winter, a crucial election season, the squalid
camps came to bear their own risks, standing as graphic evidence of state
failure, said Farah Naqvi, a writer and activist. So they, too, are
disappearing.
“Once they have scattered to the wind, the story stops,”
she said. “The job for those of us trying to give any kind of relief becomes
nearly impossible, though we are trying to track clusters of survivors. It is
an attempt to obliterate any evidence of the camps, and the survivors are now
scattered to the wind.”
With the liquidation of the Loi camp, all 41 camps in the
district of Muzaffarnagar are now closed, and the neighboring district of
Shamli will follow suit, largely because the cold has made it unsafe to live
there, said Kaushal Raj Sharma, a top official in Muzaffarnagar.
About 9,000 people have received compensation so that they
can begin a life elsewhere, he said. The rest are expected to return to their
villages, where the police have been deployed to keep the peace and talks have
been arranged to defuse tension between groups, he said.
The story of Mr. Akhtar, who left behind a handsome house
in the village of Kharad, around two miles from the tent camp in Uttar Pradesh,
demonstrates how difficult it will be to knit together what was torn apart in
two days.
Kharad, a labyrinth of neat brick buildings and cobbled
alleys, is home to 12,000 people — about a quarter of them Muslims, who have
traditionally held the roles of farm hands, builders, washerwomen and weavers.
Their employers and customers are Jat landowners, prosperous Hindus who
dominate local politics.
On an afternoon last week, Mr. Akhtar’s Jat neighbors said
they would happily welcome him back to Kharad, and led a reporter to his heavy,
padlocked front gate, to show that his house had been left untouched.
A neighbor, Vikrant Malik, 20, called Mr. Akhtar a “very
nice guy,” and said he had telephoned him repeatedly to try to persuade him to
come home — among other reasons, because Mr. Akhtar, a builder, had begun
working on the Malik family’s house before he fled.
“I like him,” Mr. Malik said, “and I will continue to like
him.”
But Mr. Malik dismissed, with a chuckle, the notion that
Mr. Akhtar might feel insecure returning. Nor does he have sympathy for the
deaths of Muslim children in the camps, calling it “the fault of the mom and
dad.” He looked exasperated, and said that five of his acquaintances in the
village were in jail, arrested for taking part in the violence.
“These Muslims, they don’t love any people but themselves,”
he said. “They just want to get us young Jat boys into trouble.”
The Jats do not dispute what occurred on Sept. 7. Several
thousand farmers attended a clan gathering in a neighboring village, where they
discussed an episode in which a Muslim man was said to have harassed a Jat
woman. The next morning, a mob of 100 to 300 Jats coursed through the streets,
torching the village mosque and four Muslim houses. When the mob receded, an
older Muslim man was found beaten to death with a stick.
Nearly all of the village’s 3,500 Muslims fled their homes
that day, village officials said — some hiding motionless in fields of
10-foot-high sugar cane. By the time the cloud of violence cleared, 61 people
in the surrounding area were dead.
The Uttar Pradesh government did not identify Kharad as one
of the nine villages that faced serious violence, so those who fled from there
will not receive compensation. Meanwhile, Jats in Kharad are increasingly
contemptuous of those who refuse to return, saying they are greedy freeloaders.
As a group of around 20 Jat men discussed the problem on
Wednesday, they pushed forward a boy of 11, the only Muslim among them, as
evidence that Muslims had nothing to fear. “Are you scared? Are you feeling
scared?” they asked him, laughing, as he smiled bashfully.
Raj Singh, a 78-year-old farmer with immaculately manicured
hands, said the Muslims’ flight had already inconvenienced him, since he could
not find workers to bring in his harvest.
“They are just creating a huge drama, there’s nothing to be
scared of,” Mr. Singh said. “People got angry for five minutes. It’s passed.”
He added, conspiratorially, “I’ll tell you the real situation: They are going
and sabotaging their own houses so they can get compensation.”
Mr. Akhtar, who has relocated his family’s two tents to a
patch of unused land in the predominately Muslim village
of Loi
On the day of the violence, Mr. Akhtar said, he saw the mob
attack the mosque, which is near his house, then split up into small groups and
fan out across the village. He was so frightened that he scooped up children
and ran without waiting to turn off the teakettle that was boiling on the
stove.
Though Mr. Akhtar has returned to Kharad since then, he
said, he felt that something had changed permanently between himself and his
neighbors. Among the damage he has sustained, he said, is a blow to his
“self-esteem.”
“There is no question of going back,” he said. “They laugh
and smile at us mockingly. They say, ‘Look, they dare to come back to the
village.’ They say, ‘We threw these guys out, but they have no pride, they are
still coming back.' ”
Mr. Akhtar says he has heard all the offers — to open a new
police precinct near his house, to staff it with Muslim officers — and finds
none of them convincing. He is adamant: He will build a new home somewhere
else, as soon as the government provides him with compensation. He does not
care where, as long as he doesn’t see his old neighbors.
“Security comes from being with Muslims,” Mr. Akhtar said.
“There is no security for us there now.”
