Soldiers
'held back to allow Hindus revenge'
By Rahul Bedi in Ahmedabad
March 3, 2002
news.telegraph.co.uk
TROOPS and police
appeared to have most of Gujarat state under control
yesterday after almost 500 people had died in India's
worst Hindu-Muslim bloodshed in a decade.
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Noorjehan, a muslim woman, recovers after beaten
by Hindus in Ahmedabad
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Intelligence officials
admitted, however, that there had been a deliberate
delay by federal and state governments in deploying
the army to give Hindu militants a free hand after a
Muslim mob killed 58 Hindus on a train.
The air force had
13 transport aircraft fuelled and ready at Jodhpur in
neighbouring Rajasthan state to ferry troops to Ahmedabad,
early on Thursday evening, when the rioting was at its
height.
"But for an inexplicable
reason, even though it was apparent that the state police
were proving incapable, 1,000 troops were flown out
only the next morning," said a senior military officer.
On arriving in Ahmedabad,
scene of the worst violence, the soldiers were not provided
with transport, information on communally sensitive
areas or guides.
"When the army was
eventually deployed on Friday evening it was not taken
to the trouble spots, but merely asked to display itself
in areas from which the Muslims had already fled," a
security officer said.
"It was a calculated
decision by the state's Hindu nationalist government."
Intelligence officials
admitted that a "systems failure", prompted by politicians,
allowed the rioting to continue. They said some police
connived and, at times, even helped Hindu mobs.
Narinder Modi, Gujarat's
chief minister, said yesterday: "Every action has an
equal and opposite reaction." His officials conceded
that this was a "cynical justification" of four days
of rioting.
Mr Modi, who belongs
to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party that
heads the federal coalition, added that Gujarat's 50
million people had shown "remarkable restraint under
grave provocation", implying that the violence could
have been worse.
A curfew was in place
last night in sensitive parts of Ahmedabad, but an air
of normality was returning. However, Muslim survivors
of grisly massacres and the unchecked 30-hour orgy of
violence and arson, were bemused.
They said the police
simply stood by, or in some cases even encouraged the
rioters as they went on the rampage, burning entire
families to death in their homes.
"The police actively
supported the rioters, almost as if they were accompanying
them," Sakina Inayat Sajid, who lost six of her family
and whose husband is missing, said from her hospital
bed.
The few policemen
she pleaded with for help in Shehajpuri Patia told her
to "go and die elsewhere". But there was no escape.
All exit points had been surrounded by mobs armed with
swords, iron rods, acid and paraffin.
"I do not know how
I made it out alive," said Mehboob Sheikh, a lorry driver,
who lost all nine family members, including his two
children. The killings ended when the first troops arrived.
"But by then it was
too late," said Shabana Abdul Sayeed at the local civil
hospital. "There was nothing left to destroy or burn."
The roots of the violence
lie in the decade-old campaign by Hindus to build a
temple to their god Lord Ram on the site of a mosque
at Ayodhya.
The 16th century mosque
was razed by Hindus in 1992, believing the spot to be
Ram's exact birth place. This led to countrywide riots
in which more than 2,000 died. The Hindus burned in
a train last week were returning from Ayodhya.
Under instructions
from the federal administration, Ayodhya has been sealed
off. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the prime minister, who is
confronting his worst political crisis since coming
to power four years ago, has met World Hindu Council
leaders and asked them to drop, or at least postpone
their plans in the interests of communal harmony.
The Foreign Office
said last night that it had no further information on
Britons caught up in the rioting other than that Mohammed
Aswat Nallabhai, a man from Batley, West Yorks, had
been killed.
One of Mr Nallabhai's
relatives was injured and two others are missing.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited
2002.
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