RIOT'S AFTERMATH: The violence is widening the Hindu-Muslim divide

On the morning of May 7, Amrit Chagganlal, a camelcart owner, was passing by the Sarkhej area on Ahmedabad's outskirts. It was the 70th day since communal riots had engulfed Gujarat following the killing of the 57 Ramsevaks at Godhra on February 27. It was difficult and dangerous times but Chagganlal ventured out in a bid to eke out a living. A mob suddenly appeared as if from nowhere, surrounded him and hacked him to death before throwing his body into a well. Chagganlal was the 933rd victim of the continuing communal violence in Gujarat that shows no signs of ebbing. His killing was in retaliation for the gruesome lynching of two Muslim labourers by a Hindu mob a day earlier in the city.

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By nightfall, the death toll had crossed the 940 mark when a group of Muslims in Ahmedabad's Shah Alam area drew Hindus out by throwing bombs at their homes in the Maninagar area and then launched a fierce attack with country-made weapons and crude bombs. BSF jawans who intervened were fired upon before they killed five of the attackers and arrested several with a huge quantity of weapons including a country-made cannon.

Since March 2, when Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi claimed he had succeeded in containing the violence in less than 72 hours, more than 400 people have been slaughtered. If the administration thought that the appointment of "Supercop" K.P.S. Gill as security adviser to Modi would tame the mayhem makers, they couldn't have been more wrong. In the first two days after his arrival on May 6, the toll was 14 and there is no sign of the violence abating. Yet the chief minister carries on as if the communal havoc is of minor consequence.

With bodies continuing to pile up, serious questions are now beginning to surface about the state government's complacency-and Modi's survival. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee did admit in the Rajya Sabha during the censure motion that the BJP leadership had decided to replace Modi before its National Executive met at Goa but refrained from doing so, fearing that his removal would worsen the situation.

A month later, it is clear that the reasoning behind the decision was dangerously flawed. Modi's continuance in office has done nothing to improve the situation. True, since the latest round of violence began on Ramnavami day on April 21, violence has been restricted mostly to Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Lunawada, a small town in Panchmahal district. But the rapidly deteriorating situation in Ahmedabad, where 45 people have died in the past 18 days, clearly calls for some serious introspection. That it is all happening in Gujarat's biggest city and industrial capital has rattled even state ministers, prompting them to express growing concern over the continuing violence during a cabinet meeting last week. Since he took over as chief minister last September, Modi had not faced any internal dissent.

STONE AGE: The body of a man battered to death in Ahmedabad on May 6

The concern is understandable. Unlike the first phase of the riots, now Hindus too have begun to suffer, thanks to a new belligerence of the Muslims who have been under siege for 10 weeks. The repeated recovery of huge caches of weapons from Muslim pockets forced some of the ministers to ask Modi about the steps the police was taking to flush out these armouries.

Meanwhile, the dangerous divide in Gujarat is getting wider. Chunibhai Vaidya, eminent Gandhian, says, "Any other chief minister would have resigned owning moral responsibility. What stops Vajpayee from replacing Modi now?" But there are an equal number ready to echo Vajpayee's logic. Says Dharmesh Vyas, 26, an employee of a private company who is recovering from bullet wounds sustained in firing by Muslim mobs: "If Modi is removed, the violence will increase because there is a feeling among Hindus that the riots are now being engineered by Modi's rivals to get rid of him. It is Modi's presence that is keeping the Hindus in check. Once he is gone things will become uncontrollable."

FAMILIAR SIGHT: A family mourns its dead

What is adding to the knife-edge tension is the growing evidence that the violence has a deliberate pattern and there's a motive to keep the flames from being doused. Violence seemed to have been brought under control by the second week of March until sporadic attacks on Hindus in Ahmedabad, Bharuch and Modasa in the midst of the state school board examinations reignited the embers. But it escalated on Ramnavami day when a police constable was killed in Ahmedabad's Gomtipur area. The sudden spurt of violence followed after a call given by local Muslim leaders to students from the community to boycott the rescheduled state school board examinations failed. Significantly, among those who were exhorting the students to boycott the exams were five local Congress leaders besides members of the radical Islamic movement, the Tableeghi Jamaat.

UNENDING MISERY: Riot victims from the Maninagar area of Ahmedabad undergoing treatment at a government hospital

Local BJP leaders point to other incidents to suggest there was a method in the mayhem. Hours after Defence Minister George Fernandes led a peace march in Ahmedabad, violence broke out on the route he had taken. The area had not witnessed any riot in the recent past. Strangely, the rioting stopped a day before Sonia Gandhi's peace rally in Ahmedabad on May 1. But on May 5, a day before the Rajya Sabha debated the censure motion and barely 24 hours after Gill took over his Gujarat assignment, violence erupted again. This time Muslim rioters attacked Bhilwas locality in the Shah Alam area. Says political analyst Vidyut Thakar: "A pattern is visible in the new round of violence. There is an impression that it has to do with the Modi-hatao campaign."

Gujarat Congress leaders, however, rubbish the BJP and the Hindu leaders' charges that the Congress was instigating the violence. Says state Congress chief Amarsinh Chaudhary: "How can Modi place his miserable failure to curb the riots at our door? He has the entire state machinery at his command to take whatever steps that are needed to quell the violence." Modi, on whom the pressure is beginning to show, retorts, "Even a blind man can make out that interested sections want to keep the embers burning with a specific objective. Only anti-national forces can be happy in such a situation."

These are, of course, political debating points, but the question that's being increasingly asked in Ahmedabad and elsewhere is: can Modi be absolved of failure in discharging his constitutional obligation to maintaining law and order? In Ahmedabad, riots continue despite two peace meetings between religious leaders of both the Muslims and the RSS-VHP combine and joint statements calling for peace. It took the VHP less than two days to consider backtracking from the peace initiatives following attacks on Hindu localities.

The chief minister clearly finds himself in a Catch-22 situation. Among the factors which kept the communal pot boiling in Ahmedabad are the 40-odd relief camps in the city in which over 50,000 Muslims are lodged. Another 50,000 live in camps spread across the state. There is pressure on the Government to close these relief camps amid unconfirmed reports that at least some of the camps have become sanctuaries for Muslim troublemakers. At the other end, the return of the inmates of many of these camps to their homes is being severely opposed by Hindu neighbours. In the rural areas in particular, Hindus are said to be laying down tough conditions for accepting the Muslims back in their fold. They are being asked to withdraw complaints which they had lodged against the Hindu attackers before being driven out and to shave off their beards. In one case in a village in Vadodra district the Hindu villagers even told their Muslim neighbours who wanted to return to embrace Hinduism. Only a few Bohras have been allowed to come back home after they declared that they "weren't Muslims" and that they wanted to live peacefully in this country.

While Modi's government is clearly inept in containing violence, its record is only marginally better as far as relief to Muslim riot victims lodged in camps are concerned. Last week Modi appointed a retired Muslim IAS officer, S.M.H. Bukhari, as the in-charge of the relief camps in Gujarat. Yet the process of giving compensation to the kin of the victims has been extremely slow and tortuous. Says Abdul Rahim Qureshi, secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board who led a team to Gujarat recently: "The task of rehabilitation should be taken up most expeditiously. Things will fall in place only if the Government discharges its duties properly and with fairplay."

However, Mohsin Kadri, a leading lawyer and key organiser of the Shah Alam Relief Camp, the largest relief camp in the state which shelters over 10,000 riot victims, says that the attitude of the state Government officials is satisfactory. "We don't have any complaints at the moment. The chief minister has promised that relief camps won't be closed till the rehabilitation problem is solved".

With over one lakh Muslims housed in relief shelters and many fearful of returning to their home villages, there are now demands from a section of Muslim riot victims for separate areas to build new townships for the riot victims. But even this finds fierce opposition from Hindu leaders who see any new Muslim township as another source of potential trouble. Politically and strategically Modi and the BJP can't offend the Hindu constituency in the party's showpiece state. But the pressure on Modi for decisive action is intense and from all available evidence, he continues to be indecisive. For example, though a suggestion was mooted that the top guns from both communities be detained under the National Security Act, he is yet to act on it. The macabre joke doing the rounds in Ahmedabad is that he would have loved to implement half the suggestion and ignore the other half. But clearly, whatever his constraints, the Gujarat fires, and the communal hatred it has created over the past 10 weeks, have the potential to pose a serious national threat should it spread. It already offers a tailor-made playground for anti-national elements to exploit. Modi has so far chosen the softer option: inaction. Now he is hoping that Gill will wave a magic wand. Tragically, Gujarat has moved beyond miracles.