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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.

 
Noorjehan, a muslim woman, recovers after beaten by Hindus in Ahmedabad

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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