Fireproof
Page 29
Beginning February 28, 2002 – and continuing for almost a month – cities and villages across the state saw unprecedented violence targeted against Muslims, with clear evidence in many cases that police, if not complicit, looked the other way as the massacres went on. Over a thousand men, women and children were killed, more than 70 per cent of them Muslim.
Seven months after the violence, the BJP government in the state was re-elected with a landslide majority. Its government, at the Centre, however, was defeated two years later, in May 2004.
The numbers, as of June 2006:
All figures are government figures, including official intelligence estimates:
Total number of killed: 784 Muslims, 258 Hindus.
Number of houses destroyed: 12,000
Number of shops looted and burnt: 14,000
Number of villages affected: 993
Number of towns affected: 151
Total number of cases filed by the police: 4,252
Cases where charges were framed: 2,019
Cases closed for what police said was ‘lack of evidence’: 2,032
The Supreme Court of India has played an exemplary role in prodding and pushing the state’s institutions to deliver justice. On its instructions, some cases were shifted out of state to ensure a free and fair trial. And all cases, including those previously closed, have been ordered to be reviewed.
Total number of cases reviewed: 1989
Cases re-opened: 1763
Cases where trial is on: 28
Number of cases ending in convictions: 10
The trial in the train-attack case and the Gulbarga massacre are currently on hold pending the Supreme Court’s instructions.
All three photographs in the book are news photographs of the Gujarat violence. The context in which they have been used, however, is fiction. These were taken by the Indian Express photographers Javed Raja and Harsh Shah and are reprinted with permission.
Some of the instructions for baby care in Chapters 4 and 6, which Jay’s wife downloaded from the net, are drawn from baby-center.com
The ‘birthday gift’ poems in Chapter 14 is the original work of Ayesha Khan, my colleague in Gujarat. I am grateful for her permission to use it.
Poet Nissim Ezekiel, whose ‘The Night of the Scorpion’ Jay recalls in the train, died in Mumbai on January 9, 2004. Excerpts of the poem used with permission from Oxford University Press India, New Delhi.
Violence in Gujarat did begin the night the novel begins but all names of characters, products and brands, all places and incidents are imagined or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is coincidental.
I am indebted to:
The Indian Express and my colleagues, reporters, photographers and editors, who uncovered facts of the Gujarat riots that inform this fiction.
My editor-in-chief, Shekhar Gupta – the head and the heart of the Indian Express.
The Corporation of Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York. For a gift writers dream of: time and space in a room with a view of snow falling.
Gillon Aitken, my agent, and Picador publisher Andrew Kidd, for their sustained faith.
Sam Humphreys, Picador editor. The book’s beacon – had she not been there, Fireproof would have lost its way in the smoke.
Shruti Debi, of Picador India, for her inexhaustible energy, her constant encouragement.
Sujata Bose, for my fact, my fiction and everything in between.