NY Times, March 7, 2002 AHMEDABAD JOURNAL In India, a Child's Life Is Cheap Indeed By CELIA W. DUGGER http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/07/international/asia/07INDI.html AHMEDABAD, India, March 6 ? The flatbed truck pulled up to the Muslim cemetery today bearing a terrible cargo. Volunteers with plastic bags tied to their hands lifted tiny charred bodies from the back, where they were piled without so much as a sheet for cover, and gently carried them onto the grounds as though they were just asleep. These 21 Muslim boys and girls, burned to death by raging Hindu mobs and unclaimed in the city mortuary for days, were buried here this afternoon in mass graves for victims of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in nearly a decade. No relatives were there to mourn them, just solemn young men with handkerchiefs over their noses who performed the final rituals. If the children's families can ever be identified ? if, in fact, the families did not perish in the flames ? they will be entitled to 100,000 rupees, or $2,050, in compensation from the state, half the amount the state has promised to the mostly Hindu families of the 58 people who burned to death on a train loaded with Hindu activists. "The government is pricing Muslims at 100,000 rupees and Hindus at 200,000 rupees," Afaullah Khan, a businessman and volunteer, said bitterly as the children's blackened, twisted bodies were laid on the sandy ground in the commodious shade of a banyan tree. The government says the train attack dead were victims of terrorism, while the more than 500 people who died in the days of rioting that followed were victims of Hindu-Muslim violence, hence the difference in valuations. But to the state's Muslim minority, the government's compensation policy has become one more piece of a puzzle that is fast convincing them that officials here in the western state of Gujarat are discriminating against them for political gain. The 21 children and one woman brought today to the Kalandri mosque cemetery joined 104 other riot victims already buried here, but no senior state official has yet come to console the Muslim community, the volunteers said. None arrived today, though news of the funeral was on the front page of this morning's Indian Express. The disillusionment of Muslims here and at a nearby school that shelters thousands who fled the mob violence reflects the broader anger and disappointment of the city's Muslims at a police force that failed to protect them and a state chief minister who blamed Muslims for provoking the worst instances of mob violence directed at them. Last Friday and again on Monday morning, people living on the school's crowded concrete floors complained that the government had given them no food, no water, no clothes, no blankets. The state did not begin to help until five days after the riots began, said Daud Bhai Ghariyali, a watch shop owner who is helping run the shelter. Sure enough, as he stood in the teeming shelter, a state health official finally showed up with doctors to give women and children checkups. Asked why help had not arrived sooner, the official, S. K. Nanda, said the job was really the municipality's responsibility, not the state's, and he did not know why the city had not responded earlier. The state's home minister, Govardhan Bhai Zadafiya, insisted in an interview today that food was provided, but Mr. Ghariyali was emphatic that it was not. At the cemetery today, volunteers tried to cover the sickening sweet smell of the dead children with bowls of burning incense sticks. The bodies lay on the ground for two hours, but no one from the shelter came to claim them. Among those waiting to witness the burial was M. R. Mansouri, 69, a local resident. He tried to explain the cruel math of Indian politics ? a math that tempts politicians to try to turn Muslims and Hindus against each other. "Politically, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is down," Mr. Mansouri said. In Gujarat, the last large state the party governs, the party wins if it can unite the Hindus, normally divided by caste and other factors ? and it accomplishes that by setting them against the Muslims. "The advantage for them is a polarization of votes," Mr. Mansouri said. "At election time, they'll be the beneficiary." Shortly after 5 p.m. today, as the dirgelike call to prayer sounded, young men carried the children's bodies, modestly covered with small white sheets, to the mass grave. They were laid in a layer on top of other bodies already buried there. A dense swarm of flies did a crazed dance above them. First, the men who carried them threw clumps of reddish dirt into the deep grave by the handful, then by the bowl full, until the bodies were completely buried and ready for the next layer of victims. |