Walking Scared in India

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Meher-un-nissa is home again, but the 10-year-old can't forget the morning last March when home became hell. Hundreds of armed men raced into her narrow lane, broke down doors, dragged out screaming residents, attacked them with swords and sticks and set their houses on fire. Meher-un-nissa's father, urging his family to escape, was the last to flee. When the child looked back, she saw a sword slice off two fingers from the hand her father was holding up to protect himself. Then someone stabbed at her with a sword too, tearing open the flesh on her upper back. She remembers the pain and the voices all around her urging, "Kill the Muslim child."

That was the season when hundreds of people in the western state of Gujarat were killed in India's worst Hindu-Muslim clashes in a decade. The killings began on Feb. 27; after 72 hours of complete mayhem, violence continued to flare for almost six weeks. The unofficial death toll now exceeds 2,000, and the vast majority of the dead are Muslims. Women's groups and human-rights organizations like the Citizen's Initiative have published scores of testimonies from eyewitnesses claiming that women were gang-raped. Tens of thousands of Muslims fled their homes to more than 100 refugee camps.

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By July, virtually all of those camps were shut down and some survivors are now coming home. As Meher-un-nissa and her friends walk around their village of Pandarwada in eastern Gujarat, they pass the charred ruins that were their homes and the canvas tents they are now forced to occupy. Encountering an elderly Hindu lady, the children fall silent, waiting for a smile or a nod—the usual greeting in a village where everyone knows one another. But the woman refuses to acknowledge them. The local mosque has been destroyed, and someone has scrawled on a nearby wall: "We don't want any Muslims here."

Gujarat's wounds should be slowly healing. Instead, new injuries are being inflicted daily. Muslims brave enough to come back are finding they're not welcome even in towns and villages they've called home for generations. Many have been told that their only chance of regaining a normal life is to withdraw accusations of rape and murder against their neighbors. Pandarwada is a typical case. In March, the marauding mobs tried to shield their faces but were recognized anyway, and some 90 criminal complaints have been filed, though no arrests have yet been made. Headman Anilbhai Manubhai Modi is among the accused, but his uncle initially denies that at least 27 Muslims were killed in their 600-family farming village, then relents, explaining darkly that there were "reasons." Other Hindus, when questioned, merely mutter vaguely about "God's will." The returning Muslims don't know where this leaves them. "We lived together quite happily," recalls farmer Faiz Mohammad Khan. The change precedes the slaughters of February and March: several years back, some prominent Hindus in the village began organizing meetings of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), extremist champions of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). "They came here and talked about Muslims, how all of us have weapons, and that Hindus had to protect themselves," says Khan. "Now no one cares about us and we have no faith in them. But we have nowhere else to go."

Adding political insult to injury, Gujarat's top politician, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, dissolved the local legislature in mid-July and called for early elections—to cash in, his political opponents allege, on support from the majority Hindu population in the wake of the violence. (89.5% of the state's population is Hindu and just 8.5% Muslim.) That provoked an uproar in New Delhi's Parliament last week, as the opposition accused the ruling party of backing Modi, the leader of the Gujarat BJP. But Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani did not relent. "You abuse a Chief Minister day in and day out and then expect him not to go to the people?" he argued. "The Chief Minister needs a certificate of the people of Gujarat and he will get that." No doubt, analysts say. "The Hindu chauvinist government is looking for the Hindu vote," charges Chunibhai Vaidya of the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmadabad, former home of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a native Gujrati. "They feel what happened, whatever was achieved, was good."

In other words, the violence that began in February and went on until April isn't fading into history. It's a plank in an electoral platform—an ominous sign of how vulnerable Gujarat's Muslims have become. "The system is just not functioning for the Muslims in Gujarat," complains Ahmadabad lawyer Mukul Sinha, a Hindu working to promote secularism in the state.