India's Own Beirut

• Share

The talk at 24-year-old Abdul Hamid's wake is of murderous revenge. "If someone gave me a gun, I'd kill a policeman," vows Gazala Qureishi, a pretty, 24-year-old business student whose anger draws respectful murmurs from the mourners. "I would empty all six chambers into him. I have the guts to kill those people, those stupid drunks who spill innocent blood here, rape girls, murder us, because we are Muslim." Qureishi's accusations are hard to deny: even hardened nationalists admit that an overwhelming body of anecdotal evidence and witness reports point to state complicity, and even involvement, in the anti-Muslim pogrom. Hamid was simply another victim, says Qureishi, shot by a policeman in the right kidney April 23 while standing in the doorway of his family home. Up a narrow alleyway a few meters away, Qureishi points to the quiet flagstone courtyard where on the same day she found Yusuf Khan, father of four, beaten unconscious with steel pipes. She carried him to an ambulance, but he died hours later. On the same street Abdul Munaf, 26, is nursing his bandaged hand. The very day Hamid and Khan were attacked, a policeman's bullet passed through Munaf's knuckles and grazed his chin as he threw rocks at the security forces that were strafing his first-floor balcony. "God, please do justice to them," hisses Qureishi as she navigates the rubble and the firebombed homes left by two months of rioting. "Please God, give them death."

This is not the West Bank. This is Ahmadabad, the city where Mohandas Gandhi set up his ashram, where dreams of a land in which religions could coexist peacefully were born 83 years ago. Whatever the Hindu extremists say, there are no Islamic terrorists in Ahmadabad now—but there will be if the assaults on Muslims do not cease. Since Feb. 27, when a Muslim mob set fire to a train four hours away in Godhra, killing 59 Hindus, Qureishi's neighborhood of Shahpur has been under siege by Hindu rioters and the police. The official death toll for the state of Gujarat is approaching 900. Human-rights groups and Western governments put it at more than double that. What no one disputes is that the overwhelming majority of the dead are Muslims. More than 20,000 Muslim homes and shops have been burned down and some 113,000 Muslims made refugees. In the 5,000-strong community of Shahpur, 19 people have been killed, 58 seriously injured and 26 homes destroyed.

In the past, conflict in India ebbed and flowed, with orgies of bloodletting erupting then subsiding. Now, at least in Gujarat, the hostility is relentless. The passageways through ancient city walls that used to link Shahpur to a Hindu neighborhood on the other side have been welded shut in a permanent divide. Armed with stones and petrol bombs, the young Muslims from Gujarat's camps and ghettos now look—and think—like their Palestinian counterparts. "Every man and woman here has a volcano in his or her heart," says Qureishi. "If defending our home is terrorism, then terrorism is starting here." Noting that India is home to 150 million Muslims—the second largest community in the world—she warns: "India will explode."

It's hard to resist the charge that this sort of thinking is exactly what the Hindu extremists and their sympathizers in the Bharatiya Janata Party national government are trying to encourage. A central tenet of their Hindu purification campaign has been a breathtakingly hypocritical insistence that Islam is the inherently intolerant and violent faith. The argument falls flat without an AK-47-toting Muslim fanatic to point to. But in Ahmadabad, no one thinks it will be long before they start appearing. All the ingredients are there. State oppression. Poverty and disadvantage fueled by wholesale discrimination. Fertile recruiting grounds in the camps and ghettos. A ready weapons supply. (Gujarat lies on a major arms smuggling route from Pakistan to the Bombay underworld.) And enough past conflict for both communities to nurse historic grievances. The calls for intifadeh and jihad have started—"I am telling people to fight," says Imam Mohammed Ismail, 72, who lives at a refugee camp—and are being answered. "This is not communal violence," says Javed Saiyed, a Muslim from Ahmadabad. "This is civil war." All that is lacking is a Hamas or al-Qaeda. "We need training," says Usman Qureishi, Gazala's 20-year-old brother. "And we need a leader." And then India will have its civil war.