NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/soc/culture/pakistan/19863

Text File | 1993-01-25 | 7.4 KB | 158 lines

Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan
Path: sparky!uunet!utcsri!skule.ecf!torn!utzoo!censor!comspec!scocan!waseems
From: [e-mail] (Waseem Siddiqi)
Subject: We have sjhown you your place - India
Organization: SCO Canada, Inc.
Distribution: soc.culture.indian
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 05:37:39 GMT
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Bombay tastes terror of religious riots

Peter Goodspeed in India
Toronto Star Jan 19, 1993



Bombay -

Eleven-year old Rizwana Sayed trembles with fear.
For 10 days she has watched helplessly as India's soul has been seared
with hate. She has seen men butchered and burned to death; felt the
tension of a  city under curfew and suffered the panic of fleeing for
her life as a screaming, sword-wielding mob burned her family's home.

She has seen Bombay's skies turned black with the swirling smoke of
burning slums and listened to frightened, sobbing women talk of rape,
stabbings, lootings and arson attack.

For 10 days, Rizwana has tasted the terror of India's future and had her
youthful innocence shattered by the ugly centuries old, religious
hatreds of India's past.

'If we stay, they will kill us,' the tiny Muslim schoolgirl says, in the
precise English that Roman Catholic nuns at Our Lady of Good Counsel
High School had taught her.

'Hindu gangs beat us and chased us from our home and told us no Muslim
people can live here anymore,' she says in a soft frightened whisper.
'The police told us to go back to Pakistan. If we don't they said we will
suffer more than this.'

Huddled with her parents, sister and 2,500 other Muslim refugees who have
sought safety and the courage of a crowd in a crumbling old rest house
near Bombay's docks normally used by pilgrims on their way to Mecca,
Rizwana wipes tears from her face.

'I felt we would all die,' she sobs.

Last Tuesday night, as Bombay was engulfed in the worse religious riots has
seen in 46 years, a rampaging mob of Hindu teenagers invaded the  Muslim
neighbourhood of Pratiksha Nagar, where Rizwana's family lived.

'They broke everything and they burned everything,' the little girl says.
'They shouted that they would kill us all and the police just stood by
and did nothing.'

'My father wanted me to be a doctor,' she cries. 'He wanted us to make
someting of ourselves. But now there is nothing.'

Across town, injured Hindu and Muslim victims of the Bombay riots lie side by
side in ward 17A of the Jijibhai Jamshetaj (JJ) Hospital.
There are 20 beds in the room and five more on the balcony. Anxious relatives
hover nearby and talk in whispers in isolated groups at each bedside.

The atmosphere is tense but deliberately subdued. No one wants another
confrontation. Doctors in several Bombay hospitals have had to break
knife fights between families of Hindu and Muslim patients in their
emergency wards.

For now, on Ward 17A at least, religious animosity has been pushed aside
by personal grief.

Abdul Rahman, a thin middle-aged man with a scruffy beard, pulls his
shirt up to display  a mass of bloody bandages. He was shot in the back
last Monday and the bullet passed through his chest. 'What is this
poison that made us enemies?' he asks. 'We have lived in harmony before
but now there is only anger and fear.'

In another bed, a truck driver  who works for a Bombay bakery is recovering
from stab wounds. He has a jagged cut across his throat and a long ugly
slash on his stomach.

He refuses to give his name because it will reveal his religion and in
Bombay today that might invite death. He says he has no idea who attacked
him and doesn't even want to guess out loud why they did it.
'I will just run into problems,' he whispers, looking carefully around
the room. Doctors at the hospital complain thay are exhausted from
dealing with the dead and the dying.

"We have 14 operating tables and every single one of them is occupied,'
says one surgeon. ' We barely finish operating on someone and another
will be wheeled in'. The fear that still grips Bombay, combined with
17-hour shoot-to-kill curfews in many parts of the city, have prevented
hospital staff from reporting to work.

Medical suppies are running low, blood banks are depleted and the hospital
morgue is overflowing with the bloated and decaying corpses of some
590 people murdered here since Jan 6.  'We don't know when this will end
or if it will begin again,' says a pediatrician at another hospital.
'There is just too much hatred and too much fear.'

Since Hindu fanatics destroyed a 16th century Muslim mosque in the
Northern town of Ayodhya on Dec 6, more than 2,000 people have died
in religious riots across India. Two hundred of them, mostly Muslims
shot by police, died in Bombay immediately after the Ayodhya incident,
when outraged Muslims stormed into the street, burned Hindu shops
and attacked police stations.

Then after three weeks of relative calm, India's largest city erupted
once again on Jan 6. But this time  the violence was more widespread
and it was a highly concentrated terror, inflicted by roaming gangs of
youths armed with iron bars, rusty swords, knives and homemade
firebombs.

A bloody cycle of attacks and counterattacks have swept through Hindu
and Muslim neighbourhoods in Bombay's teeming, poverty stricken northern
suburbs. Cars and trucks were stopped, the drivers  beaten and their
bodies thrown into the burning wrecks of their vehicles. Hindu gangs
stopped men in the street and forced them to strip to check if they
were circumcised Muslims before murdering them.

Army officers say greedy land developers may have taken advantage
of the mayhem and hired thugs to burn down the squatters camp that occupy
valuable pieces of real estate. Criminal gangs are also rumoured to have
used the riots as a cover to settle old grudges. Selected businesses were
looted  and torched and fires flared all over the city and burned out of
control when firefighters were attacked, shot at and stoned.

Bombay's fears were fanned into hatred and a lust for revenge by wild
rumours and vicious bigotry. One day, Hindus were told angry Muslims had
poisoned the entire city's milk supply. The next, Bal Thackeray, a
former cartoonist who leads the militant extremist Hindu organisation
Shiv Sena (Army of Shiva, the god of destruction) boasted he was ready
to end the riots. 'We have shown you your place,' he declared, as an
estimated 50,000 panic stricken Muslims fled the city.

Muslims throughout Bombay insist the city's Hindu-dominated police
force assissted in the rampage. 'Policemen watched the dance of death
with nonchalance,' says Ayub Syed, editor of the weekly newspaper
Current. 'We have always lived in fear,' says a Muslim caretaker at a
mosque who refused to have his name used or his mosque identified for
fear it will be attacked.

'Before, there was some assurance the people in charge of law and order
would come to our help. Now we don't even have that.'

At the height of the riots, more than 500 refugees sought shelter at
his mosque each night, the caretaker said. 'It was like in the days
of partition,' the old man added bitterly, referring to the 1947
division of British India into India and Pakistan, during which 10 million
people were displaced and 500,000 were murdered in Hindu-Muslim riots.
--
Waseem A. Siddiqi                                 Tel:   [phone]
SCO Canada                                        email: [e-mail]
Toronto, Canada                                          utcsri!scocan!waseems