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Gujarat: Missing hands and heads

20 November 2007CE | 10 Dhul-Qadah 1428AH

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ArabNews.com | 01-05-2002

NEW DELHI, 30 April — Members of the ruling Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were directly involved in the killings of hundreds of Muslims in the western state of Gujarat, which were preplanned and could spread throughout the country, Human Rights Watch charged yesterday.

The New York-based rights group said the state government of Gujarat, led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s BJP, was engaged in a “massive cover-up” to hide its role in two months of communal violence that has left at least 900 people dead.

“What happened in Gujarat was not a spontaneous uprising; it was a carefully orchestrated attack against Muslims,” Smita Narula, Human Rights Watch’s senior South Asia researcher, said in the 75-page report. “The attacks were planned in advance and organized with extensive participation of the police and state government officials,” she said.

Police officials who sought to protect Muslims were removed from their positions, while some police even led distraught victims directly into the hands of their killers, the rights group said. At the height of the riots between Feb. 28 and March 2, thousands of Hindus descended on Muslim neighborhoods “guided by voter lists and printouts of addresses of Muslim-owned properties — information obtained from the local municipality.”

“This is a crisis of impunity,” Narula said. “If charges against members of these groups are not investigated and prosecuted accordingly, violence may continue to engulf the state and may even spread to other parts of the country.” The rights body said mass graves have been found around Gujarat and that the death toll from the riots could be as high as 2,000.

Human Rights Watch quoted a woman at a mass grave in Ahmedabad who washed female victims’ charred and mutilated bodies before burial. “Some bodies had heads missing, some had hands missing, some were like coal — you would touch them and they would crumble. I washed 17 bodies on March 2; only one was completely intact. All had been burned, many had been split down the middle,” the woman said.

Mansoori Abdulbhai, a 53-year-old resident of Ahmedabad’s Gulmarg Society neighborhood, said 19 members of his family were killed.

“First they cut people so they couldn’t run and then they set them on fire. One or two women were taken inside and gang raped. After five hours the police came and brought us here (to a mass grave site). It was so well-planned,” he said. Citing witnesses and police reports, Human Rights Watch said the BJP was directly involved in the anti-Muslim violence along with several affiliated Hindu revivalist groups, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The riots broke out Feb. 27 after a supposedly Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindu hard-liners, killing 58 people.

Meanwhile, President K.R. Narayanan appealed yesterday for all citizens to help end the communal violence in Gujarat. “I am deeply anguished and pained at the violent incidents and the killings that have disturbed the peace in Gujarat and elsewhere,” Narayanan said. “I appeal to my fellow citizens to restore communal harmony and do everything to end the communal violence that has devastated the state.”

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Tags: arts, communal harmony, death, Delhi

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