Taken from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/952573.cms
Naroda Patia widowed her, lover burnt her for dole
Radha Sharma, TNN 9 December 2004, 01:37am IST
AHMEDABAD: Bibi Bano, a 30-year-old widow of the Naroda Patia massacre, escaped the fire of communal hatred during the 2002 riots, but was burnt
on Tuesday by her lover for her money, which she received as compensation. She got around Rs 3.5 lakh compensation after she lost her husband, daughter and six other relatives in the Naroda Patia massacre.
Bano is presently battling for life in the VS Hospital with 55 per cent burns she sustained after her lover — Tanvir Bashir Ahmad — set her on fire. "Maine kabhi nahin socha tha woh mujhe paise ke liye jinda jala dega (I never thought he would burn me alive for money)," Bano says. Tanvir had threatened to kill her earlier also and she had filed a police complaint.
Bano says she had put the compensation money in a fixed deposit and used to earn her livelihood by stitching clothes on a sewing machine provided to her as part of the rehabilitation package for riot widows.
Tragedy first struck Bano when eight out of eleven members of her family — husband Mehboob Sheikh, daughter Shabnam (8), mother-in-law, brotherin-law, sister-in-law and their three children — were roasted alive in the Naroda Patia massacre.
Bano survived the tragedy with her two kids — Shafiq Ahmad (10), who is presently studying in Maharashtra, and daughter Parveen (7). She was forced to live in Shah-e-Alam camp till she was rehabilitated in Faisal Park in Vatva.
Bano said she used to frequent her sister-in-law's house in Vatva where she got friendly with Tanvir who was her brother-in-law's close friend. "He was insisting we get married but I was not ready for it. He apparently wanted to marry me only for the money and started harassing me for money. He had threatened me many times but I refused to give him any money," Bano said. According to Bano, on Tuesday afternoon when she was going to the doctor to get some medicines for fever, Tanvir asked her to come with him to the bank because he wanted to see how much money was there in her account. When she refused, he started hitting her. She ran to her house but he chased her, flung her onto the bed and poured kerosene on her before setting her on fire. Later, neighbours took her to the VS Hospital.
One of the neighbours, Reshma, said Bano was provided with a security guard as she was a witness in the Naroda Patia massacre trial but the guard had gone for lunch when the incident took place.
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Hindu: Their Simplistic Logics n Hideous Ways
Taken from http://www.tehelka.com/story_main41.asp?filename=Ne250409i_had.asp
‘I Had To Dress My Boys In Frocks’
BHAGGI KAUR, Lost 10 family members
PEEP INTO ANY room in west Delhi’s Tilak Vihar and you will see framed pictures of dead men, hung on peeling walls. The pictures may be old, but the marigold flowers that garland them are fresh. So is the memory of 1984. Morning only illuminates the faces of men who will not return — husbands, sons, brothers —killed for no reason except that they were Sikh.
image
Photo : Shailendra Pandey
Bhaggi Kaur, 53, will never forget four names: Rotas, Manu, Rishi and Kamal. These are the men who killed 10 members of her family during the 1984 anti-Sikh violence. They all lived near Bhaggi’s jhuggi in Trilokpuri. It has been 25 years, and now the outlines of their faces are beginning to fade in her memory, but their words still pierce. “Indira Gandhi has died and you are distributing sweets,” screamed a mob before charging in. “We won’t leave even the sons of Sikhs alive. Saanp ka bachcha bada hokar hamein dasega (the snake’s offspring will grow up to sting us).” Bhaggi’s family scrambled for shelter. Seven families hid in one room, but it wasn’t long before the mob barged in.
“They put my brother, Soan Singh, in a cardboard TV box and drove a knife through it,” she says. It’s as if she can see them right before her eyes. “My brother, Jagdish Singh, died at Block 30, my brother-in-law Gyan Singh at Block C.” Her husband, Lacchu Singh’s disfigured body was found in a canal.
It was clear that the mob was after men. The ladies tried to pass off the last remaining man as an ailing woman, covering him in white sheets and placing a baby by his side. But the mob dragged him off the bed. “They threw him and the baby into the fire right before our eyes,” Bhaggi says. Amid all this, Bhaggi remembers HKL Bhagat, the Congress politician she thought had come to save them. “He was dressed in a white kurtapyjama, white shawl and black glasses, watching people kill and be killed.”
She pauses, and cries in muffled sobs. Her eyes lower, and her shoulders crouch as she whispers: “I don’t like to tell people, but you know, they were all drunk, they raped us all.” The next morning, all the women who managed to stay alive left the room wrapped in thin sheets. For days after, Bhaggi wandered homeless with two sons, dressed in frocks. “When they were thirsty, I’d make them drink water from the drainage canals.”
Six months later, Bhaggi was given the one-room quarter where she now lives. The room has enough space for a bed, a couch and a TV. She moved in with her two sons, candles and matchsticks. Her husband had been a coolie at the New Delhi Railway Station; he had left little behind. Friends brought clothes and utensils. The government gave her a job as a “waterman” at a local municipal school. From 1 pm to 6 pm everyday, she goes from classroom to classroom pouring water for the teachers. She earns a few thousand rupees to feed a family of seven — a son, his wife, and their four children.
Her eldest son, Balwant Singh, 31, has a job at the Rakabanj Gurdwara, but he rarely goes to it. He spends most of his time popping blue spasmo-proxyvon pills, taking at least 12 a day. “I have to force him to go to work in the morning,” says Bhaggi. Her younger son, Balbir Singh, was two years old at the time of the Sikh massacre. Three years ago, he committed suicide by overdosing on spasmo-proxyvon. Bhaggi found him dead when she came home from work.
“[Prime Minister] Manmohan Singh had promised us jobs but nothing came,” she says. “Balbir was depressed and unhappy. I couldn’t save him.”
The women tried to pass off the last remaining man as a woman, covering him in sheets and handing him a baby. ‘But,’ says Bhaggi, ‘the mob threw them both into a fire right before my eyes’
IN TILAK VIHAR, Delhi’s largest resettlement colony for the widows and orphans of 1984, at least 250 children have died in the last five years because of drug overdose, says Mohan Singh, Chairman of the All India Sikh Riot Victim Action Committee. The drugs are easily available over-the-counter at the local chemist’s. In fact, some have used proxyvon so long, it has stopped intoxicating. Now, they’ve turned to pills used for pets, Mohan says. The addicts mix the pills with a liquid, pour it onto the street and lick it up. “It literally turns them into animals,” says Mohan.
Residents suspect that a lack of education, parenting and jobs may have caused the lethal addiction among so many boys. For years after the killings, women in Tilak Vihar were afraid to send their children to school. With no education, most children who lost their families in 1984 now drive autos and do odd jobs around gurdwaras.
For them, and the hundreds of widows living in Tilak Vihar, the 1984 massacre is not an event in history, but a reality they grapple with everyday. “They say it has been 25 years, so forget 1984,” Bhaggi says. “But how can I? Not one day goes by without me thinking about it.” She praises journalist Jarnail Singh for galvanising the Sikh community to demand justice. Jarnail recently threw a shoe at Home Minister P Chidambaram after asking why the Centre had allowed the CBI to give a clean chit to Congress leader Jagish Tytler, who is accused of leading the mobs that killed Sikhs.
Twenty-five years after her family was killed before her eyes, Bhaggi still makes the journey to Karkardooma court in east Delhi to protest against Tytler, to testify against Rotas. She is one of the many thousands still waiting, hoping for justice.
TUSHA MITTAL
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 16, Dated Apr 25, 2009
Nandigram outrage
Taken from http://www.tehelka.com/story_main36.asp?filename=Ne241107PARTY_ZINDABAD.asp
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 45, Dated Nov 24, 2007
CURRENT AFFAIRS
inside nandigram
Party Zindabad People Murdabad
Hundreds killed, raped and driven out, and the remaining made to join victory marches. The CPM was unwaveringly brutal in Nandigram, reports SHANTANU GUHA RAY
Spreading opposition: Leftwing students in Delhi protest the Nandigram outrage
THERE ARE ANXIOUS FACES on the Boeing 737 heading for Kolkata. “You are entering the devil’s zone,” quips the pilot of Indigo airlines, who minutes earlier had faced the wrath of passengers for avoiding a public announcement about ground realities in strife-torn Kolkata: That the eastern Indian metropolis is rocked with violence, tumult and dissent over political clashes in Nandigram, located 87 km from the city, and that 10 battalions of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) have been requisitioned to handle the crisis. Why would he? The pilot says he had no such instructions. After all, it is not an airlines job to ferry passengers home once the flight has reached its destination.
Right outside the freshly painted, glass panelled airport building, young men armed with bamboo sticks and iron rods outnumber the city police and patrol streets in what appears to be a situation completely and hopelessly out of the ruling Left Front government’s control. At the airport, hundreds of hapless passengers — including five bodies draped in marigold flowers in caskets flown into the city by relatives of the dead — remained holed in, hoping against hope for the situation to ease.
Standing shoulder to shoulder, surprisingly, are soldiers of the CRPF waiting for their colleagues to arrive from Chennai and Mumbai. They have instructions to not even move outside the building for a smoke. Offices, schools, movie halls, entertainment parks, eateries and call centres have all downed shutters to avoid trouble as reports of clashes pour in from Nandigram, once identified as the venue for a proposed chemical hub to be set up by top Indonesian conglomerate, Salem, in collaboration
with Dow Chemicals.
The initial clashes, which took place way back on the 3rd and 6th of January, were triggered because villagers spread over Nandigram and adjacent Khejuri — a filthy canal separates the two — resented the industrialisation plan. But what is happening for the past month and a half is a simple, straightforward bloodbath between workers of the CPM and the opposition Trinamool Congress (TMC), which backs the Bhoomi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC), over control of 64,000 acres of land that is considered one of the most fertile in the state, produces 55 percent of the state’s 175 metric tonnes of betel leaf production, a significant quantity of rice and guarantees the entire supply of freshwater fish to the densely-populated East Midnapore district. Who wins the showdown is important because it provides the answer to the rest of the state that goes for its panchayat polls in May next year. If Nandigram is lost, it would send a terrible signal about the Left Front’s prowess across the state’s rural belt. In short, for the CPM, Nandigram cannot be lost, at any cost.
Till date, an estimated 45 people have been killed — the unofficial figure is 300 — and more than 5,000 rendered homeless in the internecine violence that has also split the coalition government with allies expressing outrage at the violence. As many as four ministers of the Revolutionary Socialist Party have offered to resign from the state cabinet and a top CPM leader — ESI minister Sushanta Ghosh — put under virtual house arrest for disputing figures of those who died in the bloodbath.
“It’s a battle for control and a show of shameless power reminding us of the brutal police horrors of the Naxalite days in the early 70s,” says Kolkata’s top film director Aparna Sen. Two days ago, she walked out of the city’s top film fest — along with a host of other stars and directors — in protest against the violence. “Any sensible person will never tolerate the Nandigram pogrom,” Sen says. Rues the city’s seasoned artist, Suvapasanna: “If this is what they can do to me, imagine what they can do to the poor villagers.” He was among those brutally caned by riot police dispersing a silent march to protest the Nadigram violence.
Actually, you do not have to go far to find the victims of Nandigram. They are there in a dilapidated, state-government hospital in Tamluk town that lies 61 km from Kolkata. “Give us time to clean the floors of the general ward. (LK) Advani is coming to visit the patients,” says hospital superintendent Dr Samar Chowdhury as he supervises the cleaning process. Scores of patients lie bandaged on rickety beds watched by a handful of nurses and curious bystanders. Nineteen-year-old Gautam Das is not a member of the BUPC. But when the CPM cadre attacked his village, he was the first to fall when two bullets hit him. “The next thing I knew I was here,” says Das. “I distinctly saw two of my friends, my next door neighbours, getting killed after being hit in the chest by bullets fired from close range.”
Rows after rows in the hospital’s general ward narrate similar horror stories as victims try unsuccessfully to sit up on their beds to show their wounds. Chandan Das, a member of the BUPC, had three bullets lodged in his body. “I have lost everything,” he sobs. “My house has been looted and burnt and my wife was raped. How can I return to the village?”
A volunteer offers help in locating the female ward where scores of rape victims are lodged. Ashina Bibi Shabbir occupies the first bed with her mother-in-law, both rape victims of the November 12 carnage. Ashina’s husband had fled hours before the attack. Who were the attackers? They were neighbours, who once shared food with Ashina’s family. “I heard loud knocks on the door that night. Even before I could reply, I could see the barrel of a gun pointing at me from one of the windows. They were nine of them. Two of my daughters were raped in front of my eyes. Then they raped me and my mother-in-law who is 60 years old. Anshul, Kalu, Ehsan, Barik, Bachchu. I thought they were friends,” Ashina says.
Barely two kilometres from the hospital is the CRPF makeshift camp that is home to an estimated 700 soldiers. “We have sent in five companies of 200 men and will send another 100 women personnel soon. And then, we will wait for further instructions,” says an officer requesting anonymity. Why not send them earlier? He will not answer that.
The road to Nandigram is strewn with red flags in a sign of victory. Travel anywhere, Satengabari, Sonachura, Adhikrari Para, Jambari, Gokulnagar or Garchakraberia, and chances are you will meet hundreds of motorcycles driven by armed, hooded cadre sporting red bandannas and carrying stacks of red flags, broadcasting the CPM’s triumph. That what happened was a pogrom is evident from the systematic destruction of homes of BUPC members across Nandigram. Their huts lie smashed to smithereens, black with smoke.
“Move in, we are celebrating our homecoming after 11 months. This is a simple, very simple show of strength. It’s been almost a year we stayed out of our homes. It is now our turn to move in and stay forever,” says Tilak Ray, a young CPM cadre leading the procession of motorcycles near Tehkhali bridge, the scene of countless shootouts between his party and members of the BUPC. His flags are for planting — one at every home — and the guns for forcing BUPC supporters to join the victory marches.
AN ABANDONED police bunker lies nearby. A young boy walks out of his burnt home to say the bunker, now decorated with red flags, had been empty for the past two weeks. His voice is drowned in a loudspeaker blaring the voice of Niranjan Mondal, the CPM local committee secretary from Kendamari, who assures people of safety and no further violence. Standing close, many Red Brigade members — brought in specially from West Midnapore — prepare to leave with their arsenal, which includes country-made guns and bags containing crude, hand bombs. There is no need for firepower now.
“We joined the procession to save our lives,” says Sandip Sardar, a resident of Sonachura and a BUPC supporter. At Satengabari, Mohidul Islam, a fisherman, says he knows Mamata Banerjee could be visiting Nandigram but wonders whether it will be safe to speak to her. “The CPM men are watching us. Each move, each statement,” he says. In the Garchakraberia procession, a bearded Rabiul slam, the Jamat lema-i-Hind leader who once supported the BUPC, has now worn a skull cap to join the rally and even waved a red flag. “I need to survive. I cannot turn to the police for protection. There is, honestly, no police here and the CRPF will soon return home. Then who will protect us?” CPM district secretariat member Ashok Guria smiles. He calls Nandigram an oasis of normalcy.
“We are not having the chemical hub here, so why do you need a BUPC?” he asks. Is that the first sign of the BUPC fading into oblivion? No one can say, but the spontaneous farmers’ resistance group that blocked the Salem chemical hub has had its teeth knocked out. The CPM has regained lost ground with brute force. Can opposition groups regain their hold? That would be another battle
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 45, Dated Nov 24, 2007
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 45, Dated Nov 24, 2007
CURRENT AFFAIRS
inside nandigram
Party Zindabad People Murdabad
Hundreds killed, raped and driven out, and the remaining made to join victory marches. The CPM was unwaveringly brutal in Nandigram, reports SHANTANU GUHA RAY
Spreading opposition: Leftwing students in Delhi protest the Nandigram outrage
THERE ARE ANXIOUS FACES on the Boeing 737 heading for Kolkata. “You are entering the devil’s zone,” quips the pilot of Indigo airlines, who minutes earlier had faced the wrath of passengers for avoiding a public announcement about ground realities in strife-torn Kolkata: That the eastern Indian metropolis is rocked with violence, tumult and dissent over political clashes in Nandigram, located 87 km from the city, and that 10 battalions of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) have been requisitioned to handle the crisis. Why would he? The pilot says he had no such instructions. After all, it is not an airlines job to ferry passengers home once the flight has reached its destination.
Right outside the freshly painted, glass panelled airport building, young men armed with bamboo sticks and iron rods outnumber the city police and patrol streets in what appears to be a situation completely and hopelessly out of the ruling Left Front government’s control. At the airport, hundreds of hapless passengers — including five bodies draped in marigold flowers in caskets flown into the city by relatives of the dead — remained holed in, hoping against hope for the situation to ease.
Standing shoulder to shoulder, surprisingly, are soldiers of the CRPF waiting for their colleagues to arrive from Chennai and Mumbai. They have instructions to not even move outside the building for a smoke. Offices, schools, movie halls, entertainment parks, eateries and call centres have all downed shutters to avoid trouble as reports of clashes pour in from Nandigram, once identified as the venue for a proposed chemical hub to be set up by top Indonesian conglomerate, Salem, in collaboration
with Dow Chemicals.
The initial clashes, which took place way back on the 3rd and 6th of January, were triggered because villagers spread over Nandigram and adjacent Khejuri — a filthy canal separates the two — resented the industrialisation plan. But what is happening for the past month and a half is a simple, straightforward bloodbath between workers of the CPM and the opposition Trinamool Congress (TMC), which backs the Bhoomi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC), over control of 64,000 acres of land that is considered one of the most fertile in the state, produces 55 percent of the state’s 175 metric tonnes of betel leaf production, a significant quantity of rice and guarantees the entire supply of freshwater fish to the densely-populated East Midnapore district. Who wins the showdown is important because it provides the answer to the rest of the state that goes for its panchayat polls in May next year. If Nandigram is lost, it would send a terrible signal about the Left Front’s prowess across the state’s rural belt. In short, for the CPM, Nandigram cannot be lost, at any cost.
Till date, an estimated 45 people have been killed — the unofficial figure is 300 — and more than 5,000 rendered homeless in the internecine violence that has also split the coalition government with allies expressing outrage at the violence. As many as four ministers of the Revolutionary Socialist Party have offered to resign from the state cabinet and a top CPM leader — ESI minister Sushanta Ghosh — put under virtual house arrest for disputing figures of those who died in the bloodbath.
“It’s a battle for control and a show of shameless power reminding us of the brutal police horrors of the Naxalite days in the early 70s,” says Kolkata’s top film director Aparna Sen. Two days ago, she walked out of the city’s top film fest — along with a host of other stars and directors — in protest against the violence. “Any sensible person will never tolerate the Nandigram pogrom,” Sen says. Rues the city’s seasoned artist, Suvapasanna: “If this is what they can do to me, imagine what they can do to the poor villagers.” He was among those brutally caned by riot police dispersing a silent march to protest the Nadigram violence.
Actually, you do not have to go far to find the victims of Nandigram. They are there in a dilapidated, state-government hospital in Tamluk town that lies 61 km from Kolkata. “Give us time to clean the floors of the general ward. (LK) Advani is coming to visit the patients,” says hospital superintendent Dr Samar Chowdhury as he supervises the cleaning process. Scores of patients lie bandaged on rickety beds watched by a handful of nurses and curious bystanders. Nineteen-year-old Gautam Das is not a member of the BUPC. But when the CPM cadre attacked his village, he was the first to fall when two bullets hit him. “The next thing I knew I was here,” says Das. “I distinctly saw two of my friends, my next door neighbours, getting killed after being hit in the chest by bullets fired from close range.”
Rows after rows in the hospital’s general ward narrate similar horror stories as victims try unsuccessfully to sit up on their beds to show their wounds. Chandan Das, a member of the BUPC, had three bullets lodged in his body. “I have lost everything,” he sobs. “My house has been looted and burnt and my wife was raped. How can I return to the village?”
A volunteer offers help in locating the female ward where scores of rape victims are lodged. Ashina Bibi Shabbir occupies the first bed with her mother-in-law, both rape victims of the November 12 carnage. Ashina’s husband had fled hours before the attack. Who were the attackers? They were neighbours, who once shared food with Ashina’s family. “I heard loud knocks on the door that night. Even before I could reply, I could see the barrel of a gun pointing at me from one of the windows. They were nine of them. Two of my daughters were raped in front of my eyes. Then they raped me and my mother-in-law who is 60 years old. Anshul, Kalu, Ehsan, Barik, Bachchu. I thought they were friends,” Ashina says.
Barely two kilometres from the hospital is the CRPF makeshift camp that is home to an estimated 700 soldiers. “We have sent in five companies of 200 men and will send another 100 women personnel soon. And then, we will wait for further instructions,” says an officer requesting anonymity. Why not send them earlier? He will not answer that.
The road to Nandigram is strewn with red flags in a sign of victory. Travel anywhere, Satengabari, Sonachura, Adhikrari Para, Jambari, Gokulnagar or Garchakraberia, and chances are you will meet hundreds of motorcycles driven by armed, hooded cadre sporting red bandannas and carrying stacks of red flags, broadcasting the CPM’s triumph. That what happened was a pogrom is evident from the systematic destruction of homes of BUPC members across Nandigram. Their huts lie smashed to smithereens, black with smoke.
“Move in, we are celebrating our homecoming after 11 months. This is a simple, very simple show of strength. It’s been almost a year we stayed out of our homes. It is now our turn to move in and stay forever,” says Tilak Ray, a young CPM cadre leading the procession of motorcycles near Tehkhali bridge, the scene of countless shootouts between his party and members of the BUPC. His flags are for planting — one at every home — and the guns for forcing BUPC supporters to join the victory marches.
AN ABANDONED police bunker lies nearby. A young boy walks out of his burnt home to say the bunker, now decorated with red flags, had been empty for the past two weeks. His voice is drowned in a loudspeaker blaring the voice of Niranjan Mondal, the CPM local committee secretary from Kendamari, who assures people of safety and no further violence. Standing close, many Red Brigade members — brought in specially from West Midnapore — prepare to leave with their arsenal, which includes country-made guns and bags containing crude, hand bombs. There is no need for firepower now.
“We joined the procession to save our lives,” says Sandip Sardar, a resident of Sonachura and a BUPC supporter. At Satengabari, Mohidul Islam, a fisherman, says he knows Mamata Banerjee could be visiting Nandigram but wonders whether it will be safe to speak to her. “The CPM men are watching us. Each move, each statement,” he says. In the Garchakraberia procession, a bearded Rabiul slam, the Jamat lema-i-Hind leader who once supported the BUPC, has now worn a skull cap to join the rally and even waved a red flag. “I need to survive. I cannot turn to the police for protection. There is, honestly, no police here and the CRPF will soon return home. Then who will protect us?” CPM district secretariat member Ashok Guria smiles. He calls Nandigram an oasis of normalcy.
“We are not having the chemical hub here, so why do you need a BUPC?” he asks. Is that the first sign of the BUPC fading into oblivion? No one can say, but the spontaneous farmers’ resistance group that blocked the Salem chemical hub has had its teeth knocked out. The CPM has regained lost ground with brute force. Can opposition groups regain their hold? That would be another battle
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 45, Dated Nov 24, 2007
Amy Goodman: Her Unbias Report.
Taken from http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/5/explosive_report_by_indian_magazine_exposes
AMY GOODMAN: An explosive report by the Indian magazine Tehelka reveals new information about those responsible for the massacre of 2,500 Muslims in the western Indian state of Gujarat in March of 2002.
The brutal violence against Muslims took place over a span of three days, followed an attack on a train carrying rightwing Hindu activists. Fifty-eight people on the train were burned to death when it stopped in the town of Godhra.
Mainstream analyses have explained the statewide violence against Muslims as a “spontaneous” reaction to the attack on the train. However, Tehelka’s extensive exposé challenges this understanding of what happened in Gujarat five-and-a-half years ago and demonstrates that the anti-Muslim violence was highly organized and premeditated.
The exposé was published in late October after a reporter infiltrated a rightwing Hindu organization for six months. It includes spycam video footage of Hindu activists bragging about killing Muslims and detailing the support they received from the highest levels of the state government.
With state elections in Gujarat beginning next week, the exposé could have a significant political impact. Narendra Modi, who was Chief Minister during the 2002 massacre, never lost his position. He remains one of the leading contenders. Modi is from the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], which is tied to a network of rightwing Hindu organizations. Many of the activists interviewed by Tehelka say the anti-Muslim violence could not have happened without Modi’s tacit support.
Haresh Bhatt is a BJP member of the Gujarat state assembly from Godhra. He said Narendra Modi gave Hindu rightwing activists three days to act with impunity.
HARESH BHATT: [translated] He had given us three days to do whatever we could. He said he would not give us time after that. He said this openly. After three days, he asked us to stop, and everything came to a halt. It stopped after three days. Even the army was called in. All the forces came, and we had three days and did what we had to do in those three days. Yes, he did what no other chief minister could have done.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from Tehelka spycam videos implicating the Gujarat chief minister, the equivalent of governor, Narendra Modi.
We go now to Tarun Tejpal. I interviewed him earlier this week and began by asking him to lay out the sequence of events that took place in Gujarat five-and-a-half years ago.
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, what had happened was that in 2002, in what remains probably the most outrageous act of religious violence aided and abetted by the state, Hindu mobs—which were then designated as Hindu mobs, but now seems increasingly were Godhra workers of Hindu rightwing parties—they assaulted and massacred, killed, raped, more than 2,000 Muslims, unarmed innocent Muslims.
And for five years, the whole version of what happened has been contested. I mean, there has been the version of the victims, there’s been a version of the state, there’s been a version of police, a version of civil rights groups. But there’s been virtually no justice or any remorse shown for what happened.
What the Tehelka investigation, I think, brought forward was, for the first time in five years, the version of the men who actually committed the crimes. I mean, what the Tehelka reporter managed to do was get from the horse’s mouth exactly how these mass murderers killed—who they killed, how they killed, on whose orders they killed—and then, not just that, how the entire process of justice was subverted after the massacres were over and how many of these men have then been protected by the state.
AMY GOODMAN: How has it been that it’s taken five-and-a-half years to expose what took place?
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, you know, Amy, in India, this is not uncommon. We have some sort of an amnesia about these carnages and these riots and these massacres that take place periodically. There’s religious violence, but there’s also very often caste violence and class violence, and we are amnesiac about how we deal, you know, with these things. For example, if you remember, there were the 1984 riots against the Sikhs in Delhi by Hindu mobs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed in 1984. And even today, twenty-three years later, only three people have been convicted for the killing of more than 3,000 Sikhs. So it’s not uncommon that for five years the Gujarat case has not come to a head.
And as I said, you know, the way it’s dealt with in India normally is that charges and counter-charges begin to fly; there’s a whole miasma of contested versions that’s created in the public space. And the hope is that very soon a new tragedy will overstep the old one, and public memory will actually just let it slide, and things will go on. And it mostly does happen like this.
Just that in the case of Gujarat, it seemed that the kind of schism that was actually going to hurt the very idea of India, the very idea of this great plural, modern nation, and so civil rights activists, in particular, and ordinary citizens have kept the issue alive, but did not receive the kind of shot in the arm for their work, until Tehelka broke this story, giving a shot in the arm. In all this, of course—let me just add that the central government, the congress government, which is—reigns at the center, continues to behave in a reasonably shabby and shameful way.
AMY GOODMAN: Tarun Tejpal, explain the chain of command. Lay out for us exactly how it happened in March of 2002, how these events unfolded to this mass murder of more than 2,500 Muslims.
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, you know, two things happened at that point. First, on the 26th of February, a train carrying a buggy full of rightwing Hindu activists was attacked by a Muslim mob near Godhra. Now, this Godhra incident has for a long time—the train incident, the killing of these fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims—has become a point of defense for the rightwing Hindu organizations who say that that’s what sparked the riots, which they claim were spontaneous.
Now, the Tehelka investigation reveals that, contrary to what Narendra Modi has been saying, the Godhra incident was a spontaneous incident, not a conspiracy or a preplanned massacre, whereas what followed was a planned massacre and not a conspiracy. I mean, it’s just exactly the opposite way.
I mean, our investigation reveals that what seems to have happened is that on the railway station at Godhra, there was an altercation between the pilgrims and Muslim hawkers who were selling their wares on the platform. And there was, it seems, an attempt to abduct a young Muslim girl by these pilgrims. Then, in the course of it, altercation. Then, when the train leaves the station, it seems somebody pulls the chain to stop the train, and Muslim mobs from the adjoining slums arrive in large numbers and attack that particular buggy. And in the course of this entire assault, the buggy gets burned down, tragically killing these fifty-nine pilgrims.
What follows then is, as you just read out, the MLA of Godhra telling you—the elected legislator—it seems Modi gives his Hindu organizations and the mobs three days to get even. So the state sanctions three days of violence against Muslims. And in those three days, I mean, the police looks the other way, and these organizations, as is detailed extensively in our investigation, go ahead and massacre more than 2,000 Muslims. Women are raped. Children are killed. Groups of families are burned. Three days later, it does come to a stop, but by then more than 2,000 people are dead. And the police collusion, by the way, has also been fairly established by the Tehelka investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip that was secretly recorded. This is of Babu Patel, leader of the Bajrang Dal, the militant youth wing of the network of Hindu rightwing organizations. He was imprisoned for his role in the killing of Muslims, but was released on bail eight months later. When Tehelka spoke to him in September, he bragged about one of the most infamous incidents during the 2002 violence in Gujarat: slitting open the womb of a pregnant Muslim woman and pulling out the fetus.
BABUBHAI PATEL, aka BABU BAJRANGI: [translated] It has been written in my FIR. There was this pregnant woman. I slit her open, sisterf**r, showed them what’s what, what kind of revenge we can take if our people are killed. I am not a feeble vegetarian. We didn’t spare anyone. They shouldn’t even be allowed to breed. I say that even today. Whoever they are—women, children, whoever—nothing to be done to them but cut them down, thrash them, slash them, burn the bastards.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Babu Patel. Explain the significance of this group and how it ties up into the power structure.
TARUN TEJPAL: See, Babu Bajrangi is today one of the founts of sort of bigotry in that part of Gujarat. I mean, he represented at that point an extreme rightwing grouping called the Bajrang Dal, which is associated with the mainline rightwing party, the BJP. And this man has been obviously deranged by the kind of poisonous ideology, the communal ideology, that is fostered by the right-wingers. And you can see the man has no remorse. For us at Tehelka, the most frightening thing about the whole investigation was that not a single person, not a single one of the mass murderers, exhibited any remorse.
Now, Babu Bajrangi’s case is very interesting, because in other portions of the tapes on Babu Bajrangi, he talks about what happened after all this was done. He tells us that the home minister of Gujarat asked him to leave the state. So Babu Bajrangi, after his—after all the mass murders, called up the home minister of Gujarat, who said, “Leave the state.” Now, the home minister in India is responsible for maintaining law and order in the state. So the home minister says, “Leave the state, Babu.” Then the state actually gives this man shelter in another part of India.
When the heat gets too much in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, because of civil rights noises and media noises, they stage an arrest for Babu Bajrangi and bring him back to Ahmedabad and stage an arrest. This is information being given to us by Babu Bajrangi, Babu Patel. He is giving us this information.
Then, he says, the case goes to court. When it goes to court, the magistrate says, in Babu’s own words—the magistrate says, “You are such an evil man that you should be hanged, not once, but ten times.” So what happens? So Babu Bajrangi then tells us that particular case, the magistrate is transferred out. A second magistrate comes in. The second magistrate says almost the same thing, that “You are such an incredibly evil man, you should be hanged, not once, but ten times.” This is Babu telling us the story. The second magistrate is also moved out. A third magistrate is brought in. In the meantime, he also tells us that Modi is assuring him not to worry, things will be taken care of. So a new magistrate is brought in. And then Babu tells us, on camera, he says, “I am given bail, and so is everybody else. We are all freed up.” So this is the kind of incredible subversion of justice that is seen, even after the killings.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Tarun Tejpal, can you talk about the significance of who Modi is—equivalent to a governor? And he’s running again for the governor of Gujarat, is that right?
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, Narendra Modi is a national-level leader of the BJP, which is the rightwing Hindu political sort of umbrella party. And Narendra Modi was sent into Gujarat just a year before the Godhra incident and the Gujarat riots took place, and Modi was sent there to stop the slide of the BJP’s political fortunes, because they were on the decline, and the general understanding was that the BJP would lose this election. And then, Narendra Modi comes in. The Godhra incident takes place. The riots take place. The Hindu vote, which is by now very polarized, consolidates behind Modi, and Modi has a landslide victory. And Modi then becomes the chief minister, which is the equivalent of a governor in America, of Gujarat, which is a very prosperous state.
And Gujaratis, by the way, are one of India’s greatest diasporas. I mean, they’re around the world. They’re all over America. And they’re a very strongly business and mercantile community, known for their ability to make money, to run very efficient businesses.
And so, Modi has, for the last five years, reigned in Gujarat as a sort of an upholder of macho Hinduism, of aggressive Hinduism. And for everybody on the secular end of the spectrum, he remains the most hated figure in India, because they see in him an embodiment of everything that can go wrong with the great Indian democratic experiment if it begins to turn religious and communal.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Modi was supposed to come here and speak in the United States in 2005, but the US denied him the visa he required to come in, for part of the immigration rules around being responsible for serious human rights violations.
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, I think that was a great victory for all those—all the secular fronts and secular forces that are trying to fight this kind of religious virus which is, you know, growing in India. I think it was a great victory, because it was an international snub. You know, it at least—though in India, we have not been able to defeat him electorally, or the people have not defeated him electorally so far, at least this was a clear international snub, that you will not be able to get away continually with the kind of record of human rights violations that you carry.
AMY GOODMAN: Tarun Tejpal, you’re the editor of this independent weekly Tehelka. What has been the significance, the impact, of your magazine doing this exposé, not only the most important story of our time—the headline on the front page “The Truth: Gujarat 2002 in the Words of the Men who Did It”—but also the one that followed, “India Writes Back: An Avalanche of Hope and Despair”?
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, I think the second one, the second cover, pretty much says it: an avalanche of hope and despair. You know, I mean, both things were seen after we broke this story. The first thing it did was it gave an incredible shot in the arm to civil rights groups and civil rights warriors and civil rights activists, because in India today, most of the big battles for the soul of India, for modernity, for democracy, for secularism, are not being fought by political parties, but are being fought by civil rights warriors who are very strongly still aligned to the founding region of India.
The despair had a lot to do with the fact that people expected the national government, the congress government at the center in Delhi, to act with some amount of political will and political vision, and nothing of that has been seen in the last six weeks. I mean, the despair actually carries on. The fact that such testimony, such graphic testimony, has been brought into the public space—I mean, this is probably the first time in the history of the media that you hear mass murderers live telling you about how they killed and why they killed and who asked them to kill. And despite that, the center—that is, the congress government at the center in Delhi—has found itself unable to move and act.
Most lawyers, most people in India think that the central government should have imposed president’s rule, which in India is the equivalent of a central rule, in the state of Gujarat, moved in and removed the state government of Modi and insisted that fast-track justice be done on the entire series of cases that have been pending for the last five years. Unfortunately, none of this has happened, and that’s disappointed a lot of people.
Elections are due in Gujarat in a week from now, and everyone feels today that the congress’s inaction has to do largely with its need to make vote calculations and electoral calculations, and that, again, is disappointing, because one of the reasons for the continuing slide of public property, public discourse in India is the fact that everything today is only weighed in vote terms and electoral terms.
AMY GOODMAN: Tarun Tejpal is the editor-in-chief of the magazine Tehelka, which just came out with this exposé on what happened in Gujarat five-and-a-half years ago, the slaying of 2,500 Muslims.
AMY GOODMAN: An explosive report by the Indian magazine Tehelka reveals new information about those responsible for the massacre of 2,500 Muslims in the western Indian state of Gujarat in March of 2002.
The brutal violence against Muslims took place over a span of three days, followed an attack on a train carrying rightwing Hindu activists. Fifty-eight people on the train were burned to death when it stopped in the town of Godhra.
Mainstream analyses have explained the statewide violence against Muslims as a “spontaneous” reaction to the attack on the train. However, Tehelka’s extensive exposé challenges this understanding of what happened in Gujarat five-and-a-half years ago and demonstrates that the anti-Muslim violence was highly organized and premeditated.
The exposé was published in late October after a reporter infiltrated a rightwing Hindu organization for six months. It includes spycam video footage of Hindu activists bragging about killing Muslims and detailing the support they received from the highest levels of the state government.
With state elections in Gujarat beginning next week, the exposé could have a significant political impact. Narendra Modi, who was Chief Minister during the 2002 massacre, never lost his position. He remains one of the leading contenders. Modi is from the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], which is tied to a network of rightwing Hindu organizations. Many of the activists interviewed by Tehelka say the anti-Muslim violence could not have happened without Modi’s tacit support.
Haresh Bhatt is a BJP member of the Gujarat state assembly from Godhra. He said Narendra Modi gave Hindu rightwing activists three days to act with impunity.
HARESH BHATT: [translated] He had given us three days to do whatever we could. He said he would not give us time after that. He said this openly. After three days, he asked us to stop, and everything came to a halt. It stopped after three days. Even the army was called in. All the forces came, and we had three days and did what we had to do in those three days. Yes, he did what no other chief minister could have done.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from Tehelka spycam videos implicating the Gujarat chief minister, the equivalent of governor, Narendra Modi.
We go now to Tarun Tejpal. I interviewed him earlier this week and began by asking him to lay out the sequence of events that took place in Gujarat five-and-a-half years ago.
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, what had happened was that in 2002, in what remains probably the most outrageous act of religious violence aided and abetted by the state, Hindu mobs—which were then designated as Hindu mobs, but now seems increasingly were Godhra workers of Hindu rightwing parties—they assaulted and massacred, killed, raped, more than 2,000 Muslims, unarmed innocent Muslims.
And for five years, the whole version of what happened has been contested. I mean, there has been the version of the victims, there’s been a version of the state, there’s been a version of police, a version of civil rights groups. But there’s been virtually no justice or any remorse shown for what happened.
What the Tehelka investigation, I think, brought forward was, for the first time in five years, the version of the men who actually committed the crimes. I mean, what the Tehelka reporter managed to do was get from the horse’s mouth exactly how these mass murderers killed—who they killed, how they killed, on whose orders they killed—and then, not just that, how the entire process of justice was subverted after the massacres were over and how many of these men have then been protected by the state.
AMY GOODMAN: How has it been that it’s taken five-and-a-half years to expose what took place?
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, you know, Amy, in India, this is not uncommon. We have some sort of an amnesia about these carnages and these riots and these massacres that take place periodically. There’s religious violence, but there’s also very often caste violence and class violence, and we are amnesiac about how we deal, you know, with these things. For example, if you remember, there were the 1984 riots against the Sikhs in Delhi by Hindu mobs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed in 1984. And even today, twenty-three years later, only three people have been convicted for the killing of more than 3,000 Sikhs. So it’s not uncommon that for five years the Gujarat case has not come to a head.
And as I said, you know, the way it’s dealt with in India normally is that charges and counter-charges begin to fly; there’s a whole miasma of contested versions that’s created in the public space. And the hope is that very soon a new tragedy will overstep the old one, and public memory will actually just let it slide, and things will go on. And it mostly does happen like this.
Just that in the case of Gujarat, it seemed that the kind of schism that was actually going to hurt the very idea of India, the very idea of this great plural, modern nation, and so civil rights activists, in particular, and ordinary citizens have kept the issue alive, but did not receive the kind of shot in the arm for their work, until Tehelka broke this story, giving a shot in the arm. In all this, of course—let me just add that the central government, the congress government, which is—reigns at the center, continues to behave in a reasonably shabby and shameful way.
AMY GOODMAN: Tarun Tejpal, explain the chain of command. Lay out for us exactly how it happened in March of 2002, how these events unfolded to this mass murder of more than 2,500 Muslims.
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, you know, two things happened at that point. First, on the 26th of February, a train carrying a buggy full of rightwing Hindu activists was attacked by a Muslim mob near Godhra. Now, this Godhra incident has for a long time—the train incident, the killing of these fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims—has become a point of defense for the rightwing Hindu organizations who say that that’s what sparked the riots, which they claim were spontaneous.
Now, the Tehelka investigation reveals that, contrary to what Narendra Modi has been saying, the Godhra incident was a spontaneous incident, not a conspiracy or a preplanned massacre, whereas what followed was a planned massacre and not a conspiracy. I mean, it’s just exactly the opposite way.
I mean, our investigation reveals that what seems to have happened is that on the railway station at Godhra, there was an altercation between the pilgrims and Muslim hawkers who were selling their wares on the platform. And there was, it seems, an attempt to abduct a young Muslim girl by these pilgrims. Then, in the course of it, altercation. Then, when the train leaves the station, it seems somebody pulls the chain to stop the train, and Muslim mobs from the adjoining slums arrive in large numbers and attack that particular buggy. And in the course of this entire assault, the buggy gets burned down, tragically killing these fifty-nine pilgrims.
What follows then is, as you just read out, the MLA of Godhra telling you—the elected legislator—it seems Modi gives his Hindu organizations and the mobs three days to get even. So the state sanctions three days of violence against Muslims. And in those three days, I mean, the police looks the other way, and these organizations, as is detailed extensively in our investigation, go ahead and massacre more than 2,000 Muslims. Women are raped. Children are killed. Groups of families are burned. Three days later, it does come to a stop, but by then more than 2,000 people are dead. And the police collusion, by the way, has also been fairly established by the Tehelka investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip that was secretly recorded. This is of Babu Patel, leader of the Bajrang Dal, the militant youth wing of the network of Hindu rightwing organizations. He was imprisoned for his role in the killing of Muslims, but was released on bail eight months later. When Tehelka spoke to him in September, he bragged about one of the most infamous incidents during the 2002 violence in Gujarat: slitting open the womb of a pregnant Muslim woman and pulling out the fetus.
BABUBHAI PATEL, aka BABU BAJRANGI: [translated] It has been written in my FIR. There was this pregnant woman. I slit her open, sisterf**r, showed them what’s what, what kind of revenge we can take if our people are killed. I am not a feeble vegetarian. We didn’t spare anyone. They shouldn’t even be allowed to breed. I say that even today. Whoever they are—women, children, whoever—nothing to be done to them but cut them down, thrash them, slash them, burn the bastards.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Babu Patel. Explain the significance of this group and how it ties up into the power structure.
TARUN TEJPAL: See, Babu Bajrangi is today one of the founts of sort of bigotry in that part of Gujarat. I mean, he represented at that point an extreme rightwing grouping called the Bajrang Dal, which is associated with the mainline rightwing party, the BJP. And this man has been obviously deranged by the kind of poisonous ideology, the communal ideology, that is fostered by the right-wingers. And you can see the man has no remorse. For us at Tehelka, the most frightening thing about the whole investigation was that not a single person, not a single one of the mass murderers, exhibited any remorse.
Now, Babu Bajrangi’s case is very interesting, because in other portions of the tapes on Babu Bajrangi, he talks about what happened after all this was done. He tells us that the home minister of Gujarat asked him to leave the state. So Babu Bajrangi, after his—after all the mass murders, called up the home minister of Gujarat, who said, “Leave the state.” Now, the home minister in India is responsible for maintaining law and order in the state. So the home minister says, “Leave the state, Babu.” Then the state actually gives this man shelter in another part of India.
When the heat gets too much in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, because of civil rights noises and media noises, they stage an arrest for Babu Bajrangi and bring him back to Ahmedabad and stage an arrest. This is information being given to us by Babu Bajrangi, Babu Patel. He is giving us this information.
Then, he says, the case goes to court. When it goes to court, the magistrate says, in Babu’s own words—the magistrate says, “You are such an evil man that you should be hanged, not once, but ten times.” So what happens? So Babu Bajrangi then tells us that particular case, the magistrate is transferred out. A second magistrate comes in. The second magistrate says almost the same thing, that “You are such an incredibly evil man, you should be hanged, not once, but ten times.” This is Babu telling us the story. The second magistrate is also moved out. A third magistrate is brought in. In the meantime, he also tells us that Modi is assuring him not to worry, things will be taken care of. So a new magistrate is brought in. And then Babu tells us, on camera, he says, “I am given bail, and so is everybody else. We are all freed up.” So this is the kind of incredible subversion of justice that is seen, even after the killings.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Tarun Tejpal, can you talk about the significance of who Modi is—equivalent to a governor? And he’s running again for the governor of Gujarat, is that right?
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, Narendra Modi is a national-level leader of the BJP, which is the rightwing Hindu political sort of umbrella party. And Narendra Modi was sent into Gujarat just a year before the Godhra incident and the Gujarat riots took place, and Modi was sent there to stop the slide of the BJP’s political fortunes, because they were on the decline, and the general understanding was that the BJP would lose this election. And then, Narendra Modi comes in. The Godhra incident takes place. The riots take place. The Hindu vote, which is by now very polarized, consolidates behind Modi, and Modi has a landslide victory. And Modi then becomes the chief minister, which is the equivalent of a governor in America, of Gujarat, which is a very prosperous state.
And Gujaratis, by the way, are one of India’s greatest diasporas. I mean, they’re around the world. They’re all over America. And they’re a very strongly business and mercantile community, known for their ability to make money, to run very efficient businesses.
And so, Modi has, for the last five years, reigned in Gujarat as a sort of an upholder of macho Hinduism, of aggressive Hinduism. And for everybody on the secular end of the spectrum, he remains the most hated figure in India, because they see in him an embodiment of everything that can go wrong with the great Indian democratic experiment if it begins to turn religious and communal.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Modi was supposed to come here and speak in the United States in 2005, but the US denied him the visa he required to come in, for part of the immigration rules around being responsible for serious human rights violations.
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, I think that was a great victory for all those—all the secular fronts and secular forces that are trying to fight this kind of religious virus which is, you know, growing in India. I think it was a great victory, because it was an international snub. You know, it at least—though in India, we have not been able to defeat him electorally, or the people have not defeated him electorally so far, at least this was a clear international snub, that you will not be able to get away continually with the kind of record of human rights violations that you carry.
AMY GOODMAN: Tarun Tejpal, you’re the editor of this independent weekly Tehelka. What has been the significance, the impact, of your magazine doing this exposé, not only the most important story of our time—the headline on the front page “The Truth: Gujarat 2002 in the Words of the Men who Did It”—but also the one that followed, “India Writes Back: An Avalanche of Hope and Despair”?
TARUN TEJPAL: Well, I think the second one, the second cover, pretty much says it: an avalanche of hope and despair. You know, I mean, both things were seen after we broke this story. The first thing it did was it gave an incredible shot in the arm to civil rights groups and civil rights warriors and civil rights activists, because in India today, most of the big battles for the soul of India, for modernity, for democracy, for secularism, are not being fought by political parties, but are being fought by civil rights warriors who are very strongly still aligned to the founding region of India.
The despair had a lot to do with the fact that people expected the national government, the congress government at the center in Delhi, to act with some amount of political will and political vision, and nothing of that has been seen in the last six weeks. I mean, the despair actually carries on. The fact that such testimony, such graphic testimony, has been brought into the public space—I mean, this is probably the first time in the history of the media that you hear mass murderers live telling you about how they killed and why they killed and who asked them to kill. And despite that, the center—that is, the congress government at the center in Delhi—has found itself unable to move and act.
Most lawyers, most people in India think that the central government should have imposed president’s rule, which in India is the equivalent of a central rule, in the state of Gujarat, moved in and removed the state government of Modi and insisted that fast-track justice be done on the entire series of cases that have been pending for the last five years. Unfortunately, none of this has happened, and that’s disappointed a lot of people.
Elections are due in Gujarat in a week from now, and everyone feels today that the congress’s inaction has to do largely with its need to make vote calculations and electoral calculations, and that, again, is disappointing, because one of the reasons for the continuing slide of public property, public discourse in India is the fact that everything today is only weighed in vote terms and electoral terms.
AMY GOODMAN: Tarun Tejpal is the editor-in-chief of the magazine Tehelka, which just came out with this exposé on what happened in Gujarat five-and-a-half years ago, the slaying of 2,500 Muslims.
Narendra Modi: A Heartless Figure
Taken from http://www.twocircles.net/2009sep05/imc_usa_urges_fdi_magazine_cancel_its_award_gujarat.html
IMC-USA urges fDi Magazine to cancel its award to Gujarat
Submitted by admin4 on 6 September 2009 - 10:49am.
By TwoCircles.net News Desk,
New Delhi: While Indian Muslim Council - USA (IMC-USA), an advocacy group working towards safeguarding India's pluralist and tolerant ethos, has appreciated the decision of fDi Magazine not to honor Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi the Asian Personality of 2009 award, the advocacy group has further urged the periodical to cancel the amended award to the State of Gujarat in lieu of Narendra Modi.
Following widespread protests from rights activists, the fDi Magazine amended the award to be given to Modi with the statement" Following a review prompted by the ongoing investigation into the 2002 Gujarat riots, fDi has decided to present its award to Gujarat state, rather than Mr Narendra Modi, the state's chief minister". The statement further said "Mr Modi was chief minister of Gujarat at the time of the riots. Mr Modi's alleged role in connection to the riots is under investigation in which over 2,000 innocent people were killed".
This open state sponsored massacre of minority Muslims occurred in 2002 under Modi's tenure as Chief Minister. Hundreds of women were gang raped on the streets of Gujarat, over 150,000 people were ethnically cleansed and an estimated damage of $500 million was caused to minority owned properties. Narendra Modi is widely regarded as the architect of these massacres, considered to be the most brutal in the history of India since its Independence. After almost 7 years of evasion from any judicial purview on April 24th 2009 the Indian Supreme Court finally asked a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the role of 64 people, including that of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the Gujarat 2002 riots.
"It was on Modi's watch that the massacres took place and he continues to be the Chief Minister of Gujarat. Giving the award to the State of Gujarat instead of Modi is akin to awarding Nazi establishment instead of Hitler" said Mr. Rasheed Ahmed, IMC-USA's President. "Tens of thousands of ethnically cleansed victims of the 2002 violence still live in refugee camps. The State of Gujarat under Modi continues to actively create hurdles into the prosecution of those involved in the violence" he further added.
In 2005, the US State Department banned Modi from entering the United States following his involvement in these massacres. A recent report published in the beginning of 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council has warned of a "very real risk" of a repeat of the 2002 Gujarat riots in the country unless politicians stop exploiting communal distinctions that presents a dim picture of religious intolerance in India. The report compiled by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief Asma Jahangir states that members of the Muslim community shared their concerns about the ongoing repercussions of communal violence, after the Gujarat massacre in 2002.
“Modi has become a huge liability for the State of Gujarat and the industrious Gujarati community. In spite of media hype about Gujarat's ability to attract foreign investments, a an independent analysis done by journalists Dionne Bunsha (for Frontline) and Salil Tripathi (for The Mint) concluded that foreign investment has declined consistently after Modi became the chief minister of Gujarat,” said IMC-USA, the largest advocacy organization of Indian Muslims in the United States with 10 chapters across the nation, in a statement.
Dharma Samstaappan Keliye...
Submitted by Prathiba (not verified) on 8 September 2009 - 9:33am.
The encounter in which college girl Ishrat Jahan and three others were gunned down in 2004 for allegedly planning to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi was fake and executed in "cold blood" by police officers for selfish motives, a judicial probe concluded on Monday.
The report of the investigation conducted by magistrate S P Tamang was submitted in the metropolitan court in Ahmedabad on Monday and comes as a setback to the Modi government Tamang in his report has concluded that four persons - Ishrat, Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani - killed in an encounter on the outskirts of the city on June 15, 2004, were not linked with Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba as claimed by the police.
Police had claimed that the four were LeT terrorists and were on a mission to kill Modi.
The report said police officers and their subordinates had shot the victims in "cold blood using their service revolver".
It further said the encounter was "planned" and executed "mercilessly" by shooting the victims from "close range". Even the autopsy report said the death of the four were due to bullet injuries, it added.
The report alleged that police officers including the then city police commissioner K R Kaushik, then JCP (crime branch) P P Pande, suspended DIG D G Vanzara, then ACP G L Singhal, and ACP N K Amin had planned this encounter for their selfish motives.
The report said the motive for senior police officers was to get promotion, to secure their positions, to falsely show their work as the best, to impress upon the chief minister and get his accolades.
For Dharma samstappan we the Dharmiks should come forward to eliminate Narendra Modi, a shame to Sanathan Dharma.
IMC-USA urges fDi Magazine to cancel its award to Gujarat
Submitted by admin4 on 6 September 2009 - 10:49am.
By TwoCircles.net News Desk,
New Delhi: While Indian Muslim Council - USA (IMC-USA), an advocacy group working towards safeguarding India's pluralist and tolerant ethos, has appreciated the decision of fDi Magazine not to honor Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi the Asian Personality of 2009 award, the advocacy group has further urged the periodical to cancel the amended award to the State of Gujarat in lieu of Narendra Modi.
Following widespread protests from rights activists, the fDi Magazine amended the award to be given to Modi with the statement" Following a review prompted by the ongoing investigation into the 2002 Gujarat riots, fDi has decided to present its award to Gujarat state, rather than Mr Narendra Modi, the state's chief minister". The statement further said "Mr Modi was chief minister of Gujarat at the time of the riots. Mr Modi's alleged role in connection to the riots is under investigation in which over 2,000 innocent people were killed".
This open state sponsored massacre of minority Muslims occurred in 2002 under Modi's tenure as Chief Minister. Hundreds of women were gang raped on the streets of Gujarat, over 150,000 people were ethnically cleansed and an estimated damage of $500 million was caused to minority owned properties. Narendra Modi is widely regarded as the architect of these massacres, considered to be the most brutal in the history of India since its Independence. After almost 7 years of evasion from any judicial purview on April 24th 2009 the Indian Supreme Court finally asked a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the role of 64 people, including that of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the Gujarat 2002 riots.
"It was on Modi's watch that the massacres took place and he continues to be the Chief Minister of Gujarat. Giving the award to the State of Gujarat instead of Modi is akin to awarding Nazi establishment instead of Hitler" said Mr. Rasheed Ahmed, IMC-USA's President. "Tens of thousands of ethnically cleansed victims of the 2002 violence still live in refugee camps. The State of Gujarat under Modi continues to actively create hurdles into the prosecution of those involved in the violence" he further added.
In 2005, the US State Department banned Modi from entering the United States following his involvement in these massacres. A recent report published in the beginning of 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council has warned of a "very real risk" of a repeat of the 2002 Gujarat riots in the country unless politicians stop exploiting communal distinctions that presents a dim picture of religious intolerance in India. The report compiled by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief Asma Jahangir states that members of the Muslim community shared their concerns about the ongoing repercussions of communal violence, after the Gujarat massacre in 2002.
“Modi has become a huge liability for the State of Gujarat and the industrious Gujarati community. In spite of media hype about Gujarat's ability to attract foreign investments, a an independent analysis done by journalists Dionne Bunsha (for Frontline) and Salil Tripathi (for The Mint) concluded that foreign investment has declined consistently after Modi became the chief minister of Gujarat,” said IMC-USA, the largest advocacy organization of Indian Muslims in the United States with 10 chapters across the nation, in a statement.
Dharma Samstaappan Keliye...
Submitted by Prathiba (not verified) on 8 September 2009 - 9:33am.
The encounter in which college girl Ishrat Jahan and three others were gunned down in 2004 for allegedly planning to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi was fake and executed in "cold blood" by police officers for selfish motives, a judicial probe concluded on Monday.
The report of the investigation conducted by magistrate S P Tamang was submitted in the metropolitan court in Ahmedabad on Monday and comes as a setback to the Modi government Tamang in his report has concluded that four persons - Ishrat, Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani - killed in an encounter on the outskirts of the city on June 15, 2004, were not linked with Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashker-e-Toiba as claimed by the police.
Police had claimed that the four were LeT terrorists and were on a mission to kill Modi.
The report said police officers and their subordinates had shot the victims in "cold blood using their service revolver".
It further said the encounter was "planned" and executed "mercilessly" by shooting the victims from "close range". Even the autopsy report said the death of the four were due to bullet injuries, it added.
The report alleged that police officers including the then city police commissioner K R Kaushik, then JCP (crime branch) P P Pande, suspended DIG D G Vanzara, then ACP G L Singhal, and ACP N K Amin had planned this encounter for their selfish motives.
The report said the motive for senior police officers was to get promotion, to secure their positions, to falsely show their work as the best, to impress upon the chief minister and get his accolades.
For Dharma samstappan we the Dharmiks should come forward to eliminate Narendra Modi, a shame to Sanathan Dharma.
India: Curent News, Preacher!
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 32, Dated August 15, 2009
CURRENT AFFAIRS
special report
A Taliban Of Our Very Own
Murder, rape and exile are routine punishments for these parallel ‘Parliaments’. NEHA DIXIT tracks Khap panchayats across north India. Photos by TARUN SEHRAWAT
JUST A few kilometres outside our capital, there exists a body that brazenly rejects our Constitution and our laws. It orders the assassination of couples who marry for love and snatches and sells the children of those who defy its rules. It has ordered the punitive gangrape and murder of mothers whose sons have eloped with another’s daughter. This body has even gone so far as to order that women should only give birth to sons. In yet another paradox in this land of paradoxes, our Prime Minister goes to the G8 Summit to lend his support towards fighting the Taliban, even as we refuse to acknowledge a Taliban huddling not in some foreign mountain redoubt but reigning rampant over millions of Indians – just a short bus ride away from the halls of Parliament.
image
If you dare take the Khap’s matters to the police, you might as well ask them to protect your life’
Surat Singh
All those who will marry within the same gotra will be killed. We can’t allow them to pollute the biradari’
Jila Singh
We don’t believe in any Supreme Court. What the Khap says is final. No court can change it’
Babbu Singh
Murdering an erring child is a rare opportunity to show your loyalty to the biradari and the Khap’
Lal Ram
Well of autocracy Members of the Banawala Khap in Singhwala village, Karnal district, Haryana
On July 23, the day our prime minister assured the G8 that India would fully cooperate towards ending oppression by the Taliban, a man was lynched on the orders of the Sarv Khap Panchayat in Haryana’s Jind district because his bride was from the same gotra, a lineage assigned to a Hindu at birth. Some Hindus believe it is incestuous to marry within the gotra. According to various NGO and media reports, Khap panchayats have ordered the execution of at least four people every week for the last six months for marrying within the gotra. Doctrinally orthodox, yet radical in their rejection of the law, the Sarv Khap Panchayat is a cluster of several caste-based panchayats. Translated, it means the supreme Panchayat; and it behaves like a Parliament unto itself.
Khap panchayats have existed since 600 AD in India and have managed their affairs independent of the law of the land. Historically, they have had standing armies protecting the individual Khaps. A Khap is a unit of territory – traditionally, 84 villages from the same caste. The Sarv Khap Panchayat has 300 subordinate Khaps, controlling roughly 25,000 villages in Haryana, Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Over the last five years, the Khap Panchayats have emerged as an extra-Constitutional body that has repeatedly issued extremely disturbing diktats. Khap Panchayats have been known to order killings, rapes, human trafficking, the seizure of the assets of their victims and arbitrary bans and restrictions based only on their whims and fancies. All this is done in the guise of maintaining the honour and pride of their community. In many cases, the local administration is all too ready to bow before the will of the Khap.
SENTENCED TO DEATH
Misha holds the High Court order in one hand and grabs this reporter’s hand with the other. “What have you come here for?” she cries. “You all are impotent. You can’t change them. They will kill you too. We have to live and die by their rules,” she says. Her 26-year-old son Ved Pal, an ayurvedic practitioner, married and eloped with Sonia, 22, in March this year against the wishes of their parents. When the Banawala Khap, under whose ‘jurisdiction’ Singhwala, Sonia’s village is in heard about the marriage, they issued a decree stating that since the couple belonged to the same gotra, they were siblings and their marriage unholy. For the crime of “incest” and for dishonouring the community, the decree ordered that both be hunted down and killed.
NGO reports say Khap panchayats order the execution of at least four people every week
The newlyweds were tracked down and separated on May 22, not even two months after the decree was passed. Ved Pal could not bear the injustice and put his hopes in the laws that are supposed to govern this land. He approached the Haryana High Court and got a Court order for police protection. At 9pm on July 23, Balwant Singh, the SHO of Narwana Sadar, and Suraj Bhan, a warrant officer of the High Court arrived along with a police party at Ved Pal’s residence in Mataur village in Jind, Haryana. They promised to escort Ved Pal to Singhwala, where his wife Sonia was forcibly confined in her parents’ house, in order to get her back. As soon as he reached Singhwala, Ved Pal was attacked. He was dragged to the terrace in Sonia’s house and stripped. His face and torso were beaten with sticks and his neck and shoulders were cut open with sickles and scythes. Suraj Bhan was pushed from the terrace, while, astonishingly, the 15 policemen fled. “Not a single bone in my son’s body was left intact. They kept beating him long after he was dead,” says his mother. His family, which lives in Matour village, 5km from Singhwal, came to know 14 hours later. They were not even given a copy of the post mortem report. While Balwant Singh has been suspended, four villagers have been arrested. Since then, Sonia has gone missing. Her friend, who refused to be named, told TEHELKA that Sonia was badly beaten with bricks by her family. Sonia’s uncle, Surat Singh says, “She has been remarried and is happy in her household.” Her friend says that this had been done just to dissuade queries about Sonia and fears for her life in the near future.
“What else can be done with such children?” asks Kamal. Her husband Om Prakash and nine others from Balla village in Karnal district, Haryana, have been in jail for the last year. On May 9, 2008, Om Prakash along with others allegedly tied the hands and legs of her 23-year-old pregnant daughter Sunita and her husband Jasbir to a tree and ran them over with a tractor. Their bodies were hung outside Sunita’s house to warn youngsters who might be considering something similar. Both were from the same gotra. Says Jagat Singh, a member of the Kaliraman Khap, which ordered their killing, “We believe that all those who marry within the gotra are bastards. To save the biradari (community), one has to kill the dissenters.” Villagers hail the murders as a victory of good over evil. “The parents of such children should quietly murder them. Not many get such an opportunity to show their true commitment to the biradari,” says Jai Singh, another member of the Kaliraman Khap.
Couples from the same gotra are siblings. For the crime of incest and for dishonouring the community, they should be killed’
Banawala Khap, March 12, 2009, on killing Sonia and Ved Pal in Karnal
‘What have you come here for? You all are impotent. You can’t change them. They will kill you too. We have to live and die by their rules’
Misha, mother of Ved Pal, who was killed on July 23, 2009
The absence of law enforcement in this situation is stark. A barbaric system that glorifies murder and lynching in the name of honour is rampant, victorious. The constitution, the law, the administration are all slumped in defeat. No wonder then, that Jasbir’s sister, a witness in the case against the alleged murderers, suddenly turned hostile. An insider who did not want to be named told TEHELKA, “The Khap told Jasbir’s family that if they did not withdraw the case, they would be boycotted by the community and would be expelled from their village.” The accused will soon be set free, further reinforcing a barbarity that has wide social sanction locally. Ajit Singh, an ‘activist’ of the Banawala Khap, says, “The Khap has framed ways of life for the community. Love marriages are not permitted. Our elders have enforced this rule. We will do the same.”
In conversations with villagers over weeks and months, it became clear that murders decreed by Khap panchayats were common. However, in most cases, a twisted notion of tradition and the fear of social boycott ensure the murders are never reported to the police or the media. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) doesn’t classify or record honour killings and hence has no statistics on them. The lack of figures on murders ordered by Khap panchayats or ‘honour killings’ hinders research and legislation that might address the issue.
A major reason behind non-availability of statistics is ‘bhaichara’ (brotherhood), which is practised by the villagers under Khap panchayats. To safeguard the honour of the Khap and the village, Khap decrees and executions are deep secrets. Few FIRs are ever lodged.
A GENDER STUBBED OUT
Misogynists often have a way of manipulating the actions of women to their own advantage by hiding their motives behind logic. Patriarchal and regressive, Khaps have played a key role in reducing Haryana’s sex ratio to an abysmal low. Already the state with the lowest sex ratio, and infamous for its bride markets, Khaps in Haryana still proclaim the primacy of male heirs. In 2004, the Tevatia Khap was ‘hearing’ a property dispute in Duleypur. The Khap decreed that families with less than two sons were not eligible to approach the Khap for property disputes as those ‘unfortunate’ families had ‘lesser scope’ towards carrying forward the father’s name or increasing family assets. They simply deserved less, the Khap said.
After a pro-male Khap diktat, the sex ratio in Ballabhgarh fell from 683 in 2004 to 370 in 2008
This has had a devastating effect. Families, desperate for the ‘required’ two sons are using every trick in the book to avoid female births (or kill baby girls). According to a report by the premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the sex ratio in 28 villages in Ballabhgarh block — an area ‘governed’ by the Tevatia Khap in Faridabad — has nosedived. The report shows a direct relation between sexdetermination tests and the abortion of female foetuses. Shockingly, because of the failure of the state to notify the Pre- Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which bans sex-determination tests nationwide, courts were forced to acquit the few doctors arrested for conducting sexdetermination tests in Haryana.
Those who have married against the rules of the Khap must pay a fine of Rs 1 lakh and leave the village along with their families forever’
Kadyan Khap, July 21, 2009, on expelling Ravindra and his family in Jhajjar
Cruel exile Ravindra’s grandaunt Kamal (left) along with other family members in Dharana village, Jhajjar district, Haryana
‘I worked day and night on our farms. I have reared cattle all my life. That is how we expanded our fields. Where on earth will I go now?’
Birna, Ravindra’s grandmother, on being exiled from the village
Dr Anand K, in-charge of AIIMS’ Rural Health Services Centre in Ballabhgarh since September 2006 says, “The report clearly reveals that fewer females are born as second or third children in families that are yet to have a boy. This can be solved only by social intervention.”
The 2004 statement by the Tevatia Khap offers a revealing explanation for the shockingly adverse sex ratio. Says Kanta Singh, member of the Tevatia Khap and father of a daughter older than his three sons, “Sons are a man’s assets. My sons will take my name forward and expand my farms. They will earn money to pay for this girl’s dowry and marriage.”When asked where his sons will find brides, considering the scarcity of girls, he answers arrogantly, “They will earn enough not to have to worry about that.” This could be a veiled reference to the fact that Haryana has one of the country’s largest ‘bride markets’, where trafficked girls are sold and end up as baby-producing machines.
The Khap’s misogyny is not limited to female infanticide. They rely on an age-old tactic: rape as punishment for a whole family. In 2004, in Bhawanipur village in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, 20-year-old Chetan eloped with Pinky, the daughter of an influential Yadav family. The boy belonged to the barber caste. The Tevatia Khap ordered that while the couple should be traced, Sia Dulari, Chetan’s mother, should be raped turn-after-turn by the members of the Yadav family, since her son had dishonoured the Yadavs. “Not only did they gang rape her, they burnt her alive to destroy any evidence. The police knew about it but did nothing,” says Raj Narayan, Chetan’s uncle. Only after activists intervened were some arrests made – but everyone was later released on bail.
NO DANCE, NO CRICKET
Following the precedent of Afghanistan’s Taliban, in March 2007, the Ruhal Khap banned DJs from playing in marriage parties in Rohtak, citing the ‘disturbance to milch animals’ as the reason. The real reason for the prohibition was the determination to stop girls from entering dance floors. Soon, three other Khaps joined in, spreading the ban to at least 83 villages around Rohtak. Says Pankaj Ruhal, an activist of Ruhal Khap, “Youngsters drink and dance to loud music. Cows can’t sleep in the night and it becomes difficult to milk them in the morning. Women who used to stay indoors started dancing publicly. This is against our tradition.”
Similarly, in May 2001, the Taliban stated that cricket should be banned in Muslim countries. Six years later, in April 2007, Tewa Singh, head of the Daadan Khap banned cricket and watching cricket matches on television in 28 villages in Jind district as ‘young boys were going astray’. Says Daadan Khap’s ‘secretary’, Jogi Ram, “Elders should ask their children to play kabaddi, kho-kho and wrestling. Cricket is not a game at all.” Those found guilty, the Khap warned, would be fined “for seven generations”. Unconfirmed reports state that Khaps near Karnal district have banned television and the radio.
Khaps are willing to barter their ‘honour’ for monetary compensation and material assets
THE LURE OF EASY MONEY
While the murder of same-gotra couples by these ‘custodians of tradition’ is commonplace, Khaps have devious ways of making their roles as custodians profitable ones. In September 2006, Pawan and Kavita visited their parents in Katlehri in Karnal district, Haryana. Kavita delivered a son the day after her arrival. Ten days later, the Bombak Khap declared that since the couple were from the same gotra, their baby was illegitimate and couldn’t remain with them. Uma, Pawan’s sisterin- law says, “The ten-day-old baby was roughly snatched away by the Khap’s representatives.” What followed was a bizarre panchayat meeting in which Kavita was beaten mercilessly until she agreed to tie a rakhi (a mark of being a sibling) on her husband’s wrist. Their son went missing for three months. The Khap claimed the baby was ‘given’ to a childless couple. Birmati, Pawan’s mother, says, “We found out that the Khap sold the baby to the couple for Rs 50,000.” After much pleading and media intervention, the Khap relented and their baby was returned – but only after the Khap got Rs 65,000 from Pawan and Kavita. The couple now live in Mumbai and plan never to return to their village.
Though the Khap says honour is paramount, it frequently barters this honour for material assets without blinking. On July 21, the Kadyan Khap fined the family Rs 1 lakh and ordered the permanent expulsion of 23-year-old Ravindra and his 15 family members from Dharana in Jhajjar district, Haryana. Ravindra (from the Gehlawat gotra) had married Shilpa (from the Kadyan gotra). Even though their gotras were different, Ravindra’s family had been living in a Kadyan village for generations and was hence ‘deemed’ a part of the same clan by the Khap, which declared their marriage void. Chattar Pradhan, the head of the Kadyan Khap gave the family 72 hours to dispose of their property and leave the village or face death. As time greedily ate away at the hours before the deadline was to expire, Ravindra’s 90-yearold grandmother Birna told TEHELKA, “I worked day and night on our farms. That is how we expanded our fields. Where on earth will I go now?” Kamal, Ravindra’s grandaunt is more bewildered. “They could have expelled Ravindra and his wife – but why the entire clan?” she says. Despite getting ‘police protection’, Ravindra’s family finally agreed to leave the village. As they left, their house was ransacked and their cattle were pelted with stones. When TEHELKA last met them, they were trudging towards Jugna village in Rohtak district. The police cannot (or will not) see any wrongdoing. According to the SHO Puran Singh of Beri police station, “They have gone to a neighbouring village to meet their relatives. Everything is under control.” The Khap will now control the family’s property — all 53 acres of prime land. Even Jaivir, the ‘legally-elected’ sarpanch of Dharana village refuses to side with Ravinder’s family, saying, “I am not above society’s rules. If society has decided to expel them and seal their property, they have to abide by the decision.”
Cricket leads young boys astray. They fight and gamble on matches. The family of anyone playing cricket will be fined for seven generations’
Daadan Khap, on banning cricket in Jind in 2007
Unchallenged Chattar Pradhan (left), head of the Kadyan Khap, which banned DJs in wedding parties
‘The Khap has asked us to play kabaddi and kho kho instead of cricket. They are our elders. We have to follow their rules.’
Raja Singh, a youth from Jind, where cricket is banned
Where does the money go? Says Paramjit Banawala, President, Akhil Bhartiya Adarsh Jat Mahasabha, “The money goes to charity, temples and new gaushalas (cow shelters).” When asked who pockets the profits from gaushalas, he retorts, “Who else but Khap members?”
Khaps have tremendous political backing. During elections, Khaps declare which candidate they support and the entire community votes accordingly. Unsurprisingly, during the Lok Sabha elections this year, 46 Khaps in Narwana district in Jind were so bold as to ‘reject’ the Hindu Marriage Act and declare that all politicians who came asking for votes had to promise a new law that prohibited same-gotra marriages or marriages within the same village. In a reflection of Khap power, when Ved Pal was lynched, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Haryana’s chief minister refused to intervene, saying, “It’s a social matter and society has the right to decide.” Not one political party has taken up the cases of honour killings and Khap diktats. Raj Singh Chaudhuri, an activist based in Asandh says, “It is difficult to convince the police to act in such cases as they too believe in the Khaps.”
Asaresult,politicalmovementsagainst the atrocities of the Khaps fails to gain any momentum. Mani Shankar Aiyar, former MinisterforPanchayatiRajsays,“Theyare absolutelyillegal.Khapsareself-appointed custodians of various communities who have gained a moral force over time. It’s difficult to take them head on but they should be abolished in the same manner that Satiwas.”OnJuly 28, inawritten reply in the Rajya Sabha,Home Minister P Chidambaramobserved,“ Weshouldhangour head in shame” because of honour killings and said that the government could classify such crimes separately.
Ranbir Singh, a sociologist who has worked extensively on castes in Haryana gives an interesting explanation for the dominance of Khaps in Haryana. A research paper he has authored states, “Jats, being marginal farmers, have not only been bypassed by the process of economic development but have been further marginalized by it. This is because they could not take advantage of the Green Revolution due to their tiny and uneconomic land holdings, could not enter modern professions due to a lack of academic qualifications and could not take up some other occupations due to caste pride. Their lot has been made even more difficult by the processes of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. Their disenchantment with political leadership has made these pauperised peasants look backwards instead of forward.”
Till laws accurately define and punish these malign anachronisms and until the political will is found to abolish them, Khap panchayats will continue to brew a poisonous cocktail of crime, ignorance and bigotry.
WRITER’S EMAIL
neha@tehelka.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 32, Dated August 15, 2009
CURRENT AFFAIRS
special report
A Taliban Of Our Very Own
Murder, rape and exile are routine punishments for these parallel ‘Parliaments’. NEHA DIXIT tracks Khap panchayats across north India. Photos by TARUN SEHRAWAT
JUST A few kilometres outside our capital, there exists a body that brazenly rejects our Constitution and our laws. It orders the assassination of couples who marry for love and snatches and sells the children of those who defy its rules. It has ordered the punitive gangrape and murder of mothers whose sons have eloped with another’s daughter. This body has even gone so far as to order that women should only give birth to sons. In yet another paradox in this land of paradoxes, our Prime Minister goes to the G8 Summit to lend his support towards fighting the Taliban, even as we refuse to acknowledge a Taliban huddling not in some foreign mountain redoubt but reigning rampant over millions of Indians – just a short bus ride away from the halls of Parliament.
image
If you dare take the Khap’s matters to the police, you might as well ask them to protect your life’
Surat Singh
All those who will marry within the same gotra will be killed. We can’t allow them to pollute the biradari’
Jila Singh
We don’t believe in any Supreme Court. What the Khap says is final. No court can change it’
Babbu Singh
Murdering an erring child is a rare opportunity to show your loyalty to the biradari and the Khap’
Lal Ram
Well of autocracy Members of the Banawala Khap in Singhwala village, Karnal district, Haryana
On July 23, the day our prime minister assured the G8 that India would fully cooperate towards ending oppression by the Taliban, a man was lynched on the orders of the Sarv Khap Panchayat in Haryana’s Jind district because his bride was from the same gotra, a lineage assigned to a Hindu at birth. Some Hindus believe it is incestuous to marry within the gotra. According to various NGO and media reports, Khap panchayats have ordered the execution of at least four people every week for the last six months for marrying within the gotra. Doctrinally orthodox, yet radical in their rejection of the law, the Sarv Khap Panchayat is a cluster of several caste-based panchayats. Translated, it means the supreme Panchayat; and it behaves like a Parliament unto itself.
Khap panchayats have existed since 600 AD in India and have managed their affairs independent of the law of the land. Historically, they have had standing armies protecting the individual Khaps. A Khap is a unit of territory – traditionally, 84 villages from the same caste. The Sarv Khap Panchayat has 300 subordinate Khaps, controlling roughly 25,000 villages in Haryana, Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Over the last five years, the Khap Panchayats have emerged as an extra-Constitutional body that has repeatedly issued extremely disturbing diktats. Khap Panchayats have been known to order killings, rapes, human trafficking, the seizure of the assets of their victims and arbitrary bans and restrictions based only on their whims and fancies. All this is done in the guise of maintaining the honour and pride of their community. In many cases, the local administration is all too ready to bow before the will of the Khap.
SENTENCED TO DEATH
Misha holds the High Court order in one hand and grabs this reporter’s hand with the other. “What have you come here for?” she cries. “You all are impotent. You can’t change them. They will kill you too. We have to live and die by their rules,” she says. Her 26-year-old son Ved Pal, an ayurvedic practitioner, married and eloped with Sonia, 22, in March this year against the wishes of their parents. When the Banawala Khap, under whose ‘jurisdiction’ Singhwala, Sonia’s village is in heard about the marriage, they issued a decree stating that since the couple belonged to the same gotra, they were siblings and their marriage unholy. For the crime of “incest” and for dishonouring the community, the decree ordered that both be hunted down and killed.
NGO reports say Khap panchayats order the execution of at least four people every week
The newlyweds were tracked down and separated on May 22, not even two months after the decree was passed. Ved Pal could not bear the injustice and put his hopes in the laws that are supposed to govern this land. He approached the Haryana High Court and got a Court order for police protection. At 9pm on July 23, Balwant Singh, the SHO of Narwana Sadar, and Suraj Bhan, a warrant officer of the High Court arrived along with a police party at Ved Pal’s residence in Mataur village in Jind, Haryana. They promised to escort Ved Pal to Singhwala, where his wife Sonia was forcibly confined in her parents’ house, in order to get her back. As soon as he reached Singhwala, Ved Pal was attacked. He was dragged to the terrace in Sonia’s house and stripped. His face and torso were beaten with sticks and his neck and shoulders were cut open with sickles and scythes. Suraj Bhan was pushed from the terrace, while, astonishingly, the 15 policemen fled. “Not a single bone in my son’s body was left intact. They kept beating him long after he was dead,” says his mother. His family, which lives in Matour village, 5km from Singhwal, came to know 14 hours later. They were not even given a copy of the post mortem report. While Balwant Singh has been suspended, four villagers have been arrested. Since then, Sonia has gone missing. Her friend, who refused to be named, told TEHELKA that Sonia was badly beaten with bricks by her family. Sonia’s uncle, Surat Singh says, “She has been remarried and is happy in her household.” Her friend says that this had been done just to dissuade queries about Sonia and fears for her life in the near future.
“What else can be done with such children?” asks Kamal. Her husband Om Prakash and nine others from Balla village in Karnal district, Haryana, have been in jail for the last year. On May 9, 2008, Om Prakash along with others allegedly tied the hands and legs of her 23-year-old pregnant daughter Sunita and her husband Jasbir to a tree and ran them over with a tractor. Their bodies were hung outside Sunita’s house to warn youngsters who might be considering something similar. Both were from the same gotra. Says Jagat Singh, a member of the Kaliraman Khap, which ordered their killing, “We believe that all those who marry within the gotra are bastards. To save the biradari (community), one has to kill the dissenters.” Villagers hail the murders as a victory of good over evil. “The parents of such children should quietly murder them. Not many get such an opportunity to show their true commitment to the biradari,” says Jai Singh, another member of the Kaliraman Khap.
Couples from the same gotra are siblings. For the crime of incest and for dishonouring the community, they should be killed’
Banawala Khap, March 12, 2009, on killing Sonia and Ved Pal in Karnal
‘What have you come here for? You all are impotent. You can’t change them. They will kill you too. We have to live and die by their rules’
Misha, mother of Ved Pal, who was killed on July 23, 2009
The absence of law enforcement in this situation is stark. A barbaric system that glorifies murder and lynching in the name of honour is rampant, victorious. The constitution, the law, the administration are all slumped in defeat. No wonder then, that Jasbir’s sister, a witness in the case against the alleged murderers, suddenly turned hostile. An insider who did not want to be named told TEHELKA, “The Khap told Jasbir’s family that if they did not withdraw the case, they would be boycotted by the community and would be expelled from their village.” The accused will soon be set free, further reinforcing a barbarity that has wide social sanction locally. Ajit Singh, an ‘activist’ of the Banawala Khap, says, “The Khap has framed ways of life for the community. Love marriages are not permitted. Our elders have enforced this rule. We will do the same.”
In conversations with villagers over weeks and months, it became clear that murders decreed by Khap panchayats were common. However, in most cases, a twisted notion of tradition and the fear of social boycott ensure the murders are never reported to the police or the media. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) doesn’t classify or record honour killings and hence has no statistics on them. The lack of figures on murders ordered by Khap panchayats or ‘honour killings’ hinders research and legislation that might address the issue.
A major reason behind non-availability of statistics is ‘bhaichara’ (brotherhood), which is practised by the villagers under Khap panchayats. To safeguard the honour of the Khap and the village, Khap decrees and executions are deep secrets. Few FIRs are ever lodged.
A GENDER STUBBED OUT
Misogynists often have a way of manipulating the actions of women to their own advantage by hiding their motives behind logic. Patriarchal and regressive, Khaps have played a key role in reducing Haryana’s sex ratio to an abysmal low. Already the state with the lowest sex ratio, and infamous for its bride markets, Khaps in Haryana still proclaim the primacy of male heirs. In 2004, the Tevatia Khap was ‘hearing’ a property dispute in Duleypur. The Khap decreed that families with less than two sons were not eligible to approach the Khap for property disputes as those ‘unfortunate’ families had ‘lesser scope’ towards carrying forward the father’s name or increasing family assets. They simply deserved less, the Khap said.
After a pro-male Khap diktat, the sex ratio in Ballabhgarh fell from 683 in 2004 to 370 in 2008
This has had a devastating effect. Families, desperate for the ‘required’ two sons are using every trick in the book to avoid female births (or kill baby girls). According to a report by the premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the sex ratio in 28 villages in Ballabhgarh block — an area ‘governed’ by the Tevatia Khap in Faridabad — has nosedived. The report shows a direct relation between sexdetermination tests and the abortion of female foetuses. Shockingly, because of the failure of the state to notify the Pre- Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which bans sex-determination tests nationwide, courts were forced to acquit the few doctors arrested for conducting sexdetermination tests in Haryana.
Those who have married against the rules of the Khap must pay a fine of Rs 1 lakh and leave the village along with their families forever’
Kadyan Khap, July 21, 2009, on expelling Ravindra and his family in Jhajjar
Cruel exile Ravindra’s grandaunt Kamal (left) along with other family members in Dharana village, Jhajjar district, Haryana
‘I worked day and night on our farms. I have reared cattle all my life. That is how we expanded our fields. Where on earth will I go now?’
Birna, Ravindra’s grandmother, on being exiled from the village
Dr Anand K, in-charge of AIIMS’ Rural Health Services Centre in Ballabhgarh since September 2006 says, “The report clearly reveals that fewer females are born as second or third children in families that are yet to have a boy. This can be solved only by social intervention.”
The 2004 statement by the Tevatia Khap offers a revealing explanation for the shockingly adverse sex ratio. Says Kanta Singh, member of the Tevatia Khap and father of a daughter older than his three sons, “Sons are a man’s assets. My sons will take my name forward and expand my farms. They will earn money to pay for this girl’s dowry and marriage.”When asked where his sons will find brides, considering the scarcity of girls, he answers arrogantly, “They will earn enough not to have to worry about that.” This could be a veiled reference to the fact that Haryana has one of the country’s largest ‘bride markets’, where trafficked girls are sold and end up as baby-producing machines.
The Khap’s misogyny is not limited to female infanticide. They rely on an age-old tactic: rape as punishment for a whole family. In 2004, in Bhawanipur village in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, 20-year-old Chetan eloped with Pinky, the daughter of an influential Yadav family. The boy belonged to the barber caste. The Tevatia Khap ordered that while the couple should be traced, Sia Dulari, Chetan’s mother, should be raped turn-after-turn by the members of the Yadav family, since her son had dishonoured the Yadavs. “Not only did they gang rape her, they burnt her alive to destroy any evidence. The police knew about it but did nothing,” says Raj Narayan, Chetan’s uncle. Only after activists intervened were some arrests made – but everyone was later released on bail.
NO DANCE, NO CRICKET
Following the precedent of Afghanistan’s Taliban, in March 2007, the Ruhal Khap banned DJs from playing in marriage parties in Rohtak, citing the ‘disturbance to milch animals’ as the reason. The real reason for the prohibition was the determination to stop girls from entering dance floors. Soon, three other Khaps joined in, spreading the ban to at least 83 villages around Rohtak. Says Pankaj Ruhal, an activist of Ruhal Khap, “Youngsters drink and dance to loud music. Cows can’t sleep in the night and it becomes difficult to milk them in the morning. Women who used to stay indoors started dancing publicly. This is against our tradition.”
Similarly, in May 2001, the Taliban stated that cricket should be banned in Muslim countries. Six years later, in April 2007, Tewa Singh, head of the Daadan Khap banned cricket and watching cricket matches on television in 28 villages in Jind district as ‘young boys were going astray’. Says Daadan Khap’s ‘secretary’, Jogi Ram, “Elders should ask their children to play kabaddi, kho-kho and wrestling. Cricket is not a game at all.” Those found guilty, the Khap warned, would be fined “for seven generations”. Unconfirmed reports state that Khaps near Karnal district have banned television and the radio.
Khaps are willing to barter their ‘honour’ for monetary compensation and material assets
THE LURE OF EASY MONEY
While the murder of same-gotra couples by these ‘custodians of tradition’ is commonplace, Khaps have devious ways of making their roles as custodians profitable ones. In September 2006, Pawan and Kavita visited their parents in Katlehri in Karnal district, Haryana. Kavita delivered a son the day after her arrival. Ten days later, the Bombak Khap declared that since the couple were from the same gotra, their baby was illegitimate and couldn’t remain with them. Uma, Pawan’s sisterin- law says, “The ten-day-old baby was roughly snatched away by the Khap’s representatives.” What followed was a bizarre panchayat meeting in which Kavita was beaten mercilessly until she agreed to tie a rakhi (a mark of being a sibling) on her husband’s wrist. Their son went missing for three months. The Khap claimed the baby was ‘given’ to a childless couple. Birmati, Pawan’s mother, says, “We found out that the Khap sold the baby to the couple for Rs 50,000.” After much pleading and media intervention, the Khap relented and their baby was returned – but only after the Khap got Rs 65,000 from Pawan and Kavita. The couple now live in Mumbai and plan never to return to their village.
Though the Khap says honour is paramount, it frequently barters this honour for material assets without blinking. On July 21, the Kadyan Khap fined the family Rs 1 lakh and ordered the permanent expulsion of 23-year-old Ravindra and his 15 family members from Dharana in Jhajjar district, Haryana. Ravindra (from the Gehlawat gotra) had married Shilpa (from the Kadyan gotra). Even though their gotras were different, Ravindra’s family had been living in a Kadyan village for generations and was hence ‘deemed’ a part of the same clan by the Khap, which declared their marriage void. Chattar Pradhan, the head of the Kadyan Khap gave the family 72 hours to dispose of their property and leave the village or face death. As time greedily ate away at the hours before the deadline was to expire, Ravindra’s 90-yearold grandmother Birna told TEHELKA, “I worked day and night on our farms. That is how we expanded our fields. Where on earth will I go now?” Kamal, Ravindra’s grandaunt is more bewildered. “They could have expelled Ravindra and his wife – but why the entire clan?” she says. Despite getting ‘police protection’, Ravindra’s family finally agreed to leave the village. As they left, their house was ransacked and their cattle were pelted with stones. When TEHELKA last met them, they were trudging towards Jugna village in Rohtak district. The police cannot (or will not) see any wrongdoing. According to the SHO Puran Singh of Beri police station, “They have gone to a neighbouring village to meet their relatives. Everything is under control.” The Khap will now control the family’s property — all 53 acres of prime land. Even Jaivir, the ‘legally-elected’ sarpanch of Dharana village refuses to side with Ravinder’s family, saying, “I am not above society’s rules. If society has decided to expel them and seal their property, they have to abide by the decision.”
Cricket leads young boys astray. They fight and gamble on matches. The family of anyone playing cricket will be fined for seven generations’
Daadan Khap, on banning cricket in Jind in 2007
Unchallenged Chattar Pradhan (left), head of the Kadyan Khap, which banned DJs in wedding parties
‘The Khap has asked us to play kabaddi and kho kho instead of cricket. They are our elders. We have to follow their rules.’
Raja Singh, a youth from Jind, where cricket is banned
Where does the money go? Says Paramjit Banawala, President, Akhil Bhartiya Adarsh Jat Mahasabha, “The money goes to charity, temples and new gaushalas (cow shelters).” When asked who pockets the profits from gaushalas, he retorts, “Who else but Khap members?”
Khaps have tremendous political backing. During elections, Khaps declare which candidate they support and the entire community votes accordingly. Unsurprisingly, during the Lok Sabha elections this year, 46 Khaps in Narwana district in Jind were so bold as to ‘reject’ the Hindu Marriage Act and declare that all politicians who came asking for votes had to promise a new law that prohibited same-gotra marriages or marriages within the same village. In a reflection of Khap power, when Ved Pal was lynched, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Haryana’s chief minister refused to intervene, saying, “It’s a social matter and society has the right to decide.” Not one political party has taken up the cases of honour killings and Khap diktats. Raj Singh Chaudhuri, an activist based in Asandh says, “It is difficult to convince the police to act in such cases as they too believe in the Khaps.”
Asaresult,politicalmovementsagainst the atrocities of the Khaps fails to gain any momentum. Mani Shankar Aiyar, former MinisterforPanchayatiRajsays,“Theyare absolutelyillegal.Khapsareself-appointed custodians of various communities who have gained a moral force over time. It’s difficult to take them head on but they should be abolished in the same manner that Satiwas.”OnJuly 28, inawritten reply in the Rajya Sabha,Home Minister P Chidambaramobserved,“ Weshouldhangour head in shame” because of honour killings and said that the government could classify such crimes separately.
Ranbir Singh, a sociologist who has worked extensively on castes in Haryana gives an interesting explanation for the dominance of Khaps in Haryana. A research paper he has authored states, “Jats, being marginal farmers, have not only been bypassed by the process of economic development but have been further marginalized by it. This is because they could not take advantage of the Green Revolution due to their tiny and uneconomic land holdings, could not enter modern professions due to a lack of academic qualifications and could not take up some other occupations due to caste pride. Their lot has been made even more difficult by the processes of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. Their disenchantment with political leadership has made these pauperised peasants look backwards instead of forward.”
Till laws accurately define and punish these malign anachronisms and until the political will is found to abolish them, Khap panchayats will continue to brew a poisonous cocktail of crime, ignorance and bigotry.
WRITER’S EMAIL
neha@tehelka.com
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 32, Dated August 15, 2009
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