by Mark Tully
A curfew was imposed in the immediate vicinity, known as Kalupur, but the police were reluctant to extend the curfew any wider for fear of causing panic and giving the rest of India the impression that serious communal rioting had started in Ahmedabad yet again. Over the next three days the trouble built up, with police opening fire to disperse groups throwing stones at each other. Stabbings were reported from several different areas. On the fourth day of the riots, 6 April, twenty-three people were killed and seventy injured. Thirty-one shops were looted and burnt. The seriousness of the situation could no longer be disguised so the curfew was extended to all the other areas of the city with a past record of communal violence.
Then on 7 April there was what looked like another deliberate attempt to enrage Hindus. A rumour swept through the city that the mahant or priest of the temple of Lord Jagannath had been killed. This was highly unlikely, because the mahant rarely went out of the temple and, when he did, he was surrounded by a large number of guards and devotees, but even people ringing up newspaper offices were told that it appeared that the mahant had been killed. When the police investigated the report, however, they found that the man who had been killed was a comparatively unknown sadhu who seemed to have been involved in some row over hashish, because he was killed near a shop which was licensed to sell the drug to addicts. All India Radio then broadcast special bulletins denying that the mahant had been killed. The next day the army staged what are known as flag marches through the areas under curfew, as a demonstration of the government's determination to end the rioting. That seemed to work: there were stray incidents of stabbing for a few more days, but by 14 April the violence had stopped.
Inevitably the press interpreted the riots as further evidence of the threat of fundamentalism. The Hindu, a sober, national English-language daily which, in spite of its name, is not sectarian wrote, ‘The behaviour of the fundamentalists needs to be condemned. It's time the new government took a deep look into the way the communities have been drifting apart.’ That assertion ignores the evidence that there had been a deliberate attempt to incite Hindu–Muslim riots. It suggests that religious fundamentalism is making the divide between Hindus and Muslims deeper and deeper. I found exactly the opposite in Ahmedabad. I found that the poor among the Muslims, who are the real sufferers when communal riots start, blame politics, not religion, for the violence. But then most editorial writers don't speak to poor Muslims and so are easily carried away by the fashionable fear of fundamentalism.
Ahmedabad is the main city of Gujarat, Mahatma Gandhi's home state. He founded his first ashram on the banks of the now dried-up Sabarmati river which divides the city, and he formed a textile union for the mill-workers in the city. Because of its cotton mills, Ahmedabad used to be known as the Manchester of India – rather unfairly, because it remained a particularly Indian city throughout the raj. It might have thought it was better than Manchester, but never that it was Manchester. In Ahmedabad – a Study in Indian Urban History, Kenneth Gillion, an American historian, wrote of the city, ‘there was little British investment; there were never many Englishmen in the city; there was no higher education to speak of; the English language was understood by few; and there was no English press.’ Ahmedabad today is still resisting at least some of the influences of modern Western culture. It is, for example, the only large city in India without a five-star hotel. It is the only large city where prohibition is in force. It is the only large city which does not have an English-language newspaper of its own. It is a city which has seen several declines, but it has always recovered because its traders and its entrepreneurs have had the energy and initiative to find new opportunities. Gujaratis are fond of pointing out that they were doing business in Africa before the British arrived there. The Gujarati traders who went to Britain after they were forced out of Africa have proved their ability to turn disaster into opportunity.
Ahmedabad always had a reputation as a peaceful hardworking city. In spite of its large Muslim population it was not much affected by the turmoil of partition. Communal violence came to the city only when the politics of Gujarat became unstable, and that surely cannot be just a coincidence. The first and the worst riots took place in 1969, when some say as many as 2,700 people were killed in six days – the official figure of 1,200 is bad enough. There were few stabbings then – people were hacked to death with axes, speared or burnt alive. Because the police took no action, whole areas of the city were in the control of the mobs for two and a half days. When the police did move on to the streets, it took them another three days to restore some semblance of order. At that time the hostility in the Congress Party between Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai, an austere disciple of the Mahatma, had come into the open and the party was splitting. Gujarat, being Morarji's home state, was his political base. The chief minister of Gujarat in 1969 was a Morarji man, and some believe the riots were deliberately engineered by supporters of Indira Gandhi to discredit her opponent.
The riots in 1985 which lasted into 1986 started just after Mahdavsinh Solanki, a loyal supporter of Indira Gandhi's family, had won the election to the Gujarat state assembly by wooing the backward-caste vote for the first time. He himself belonged to one of the backward castes. In spite of their numerical superiority, they had always been ignored by the influential upper castes who dominated the Congress. Solanki reckoned that by clubbing together the backward vote the Congress would be unbeatable. Of course he was not unmindful of the fact that, as a backward, he would be unbeatable as leader of the party too. But the upper-caste Congressmen were not going to take this lying down. It was they who started an agitation against Solanki's decision to increase the quotas of government jobs and places in universities reserved for the backward castes – an agitation which soon degenerated into Hindu-Muslim violence.
Now, in April 1990, I had come to Ahmedabad to report on the aftermath of yet more riots, which had broken out just after a major political event – the rout of the Congress Party in the state-assembly election. The new government was a coalition of the Janata Dal, which had recently come to power in the centre, and the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, which was a Hindu party. The success of the BJP in the recent general election and now in state-assembly elections was ascribed by many to ‘a wave of Hindu fundamentalism sweeping the country’.
This opinion appeared to be justified by the BJP's support for a campaign to build a temple in the northern-Indian town of Ayodhya on what was said to be the site of the birth of the Hindu god Lord Ram. Unfortunately there was already a mosque there, and Muslim leaders had threatened that India would feel ‘the wrath of their community’ if it were destroyed. During the months leading up to the 1989 general election, ceremonies and processions were organized throughout most of India at which the faithful were encouraged to buy a brick for the temple and have it blessed. The President of the BJP took part in one of these ceremonies in New Delhi. The campaign for the temple undoubtedly gave the general election a communal colouring, and these provocative celebrations sparked off clashes between Hindus and Muslims in which the Muslims generally came off worst. In the town of Bhagalpur in Bihar, the violence was described as the worst since the partition of India.
In Gujarat there were, according to the official records, seventy-five ‘communal incidents’ connected with the campaign to build the temple, seven people were killed, and 133 were injured. Yet when I got to Ahmedabad I found that it was still not a Belfast or a Beirut, a city divided against itself. Sound common sense had again foiled the politicians who wanted to play politics with religion.
The first people I went to see were a group of Muslim women. As I have said, the Muslims generally come off worse in religious riots and I wanted to find out whether they believed their community was in danger of being engulfed by a wave of communal hatred. I found them sitting on the roof of an ugly grey building near the Sabarmati, which was the headquarters of a remarkable organization known as SEWA, or the Self Employed Women's Association. The women were stamping
coarse cotton cloth with wooden blocks – hand printing. They were members of a cooperative founded by SEWA to protect them from middlemen and help them upgrade their skills.
In Ahmedabad, riots are always known as ‘toofan’ or ‘hurricanes’. One of the younger printing women, Hasina, said to me, ‘It's not so much the toofan itself we suffer from as the curfew. We don't have the sort of homes or shops that mobs will loot, and if we stay inside we normally won't be harmed during the riots. But we suffer very badly from the curfews. We are relying on daily work, and so if we can't go out to work where do we get the money? If a man goes out to his work he may get killed, and his family won't even know where he is.’
‘Did any of your relatives get killed this time?’ I asked.
‘Someone was killed just outside our house. We saw the blood. One of my friends said a young man had been killed. He was a good man. His father had died and he was looking after the whole family. He was fasting.’
The riots had come in the middle of Ramzan, the month of fasting. The young man had died of stab wounds. Stabbing is a very common occurrence during communal violence in Ahmedabad, and this time doctors noticed a remarkable similarity in all the wounds of stabbing victims, indicating that the attackers had been trained. This has led some to believe that the stabbings were organized by one of the leaders of the Ahmedabad underworld who had both Hindu and Muslim gangs under him, but no one would name that leader.
For Indian Muslims, the cure for riots is often worse than the disease, because the medicine is administered by the police force, whose members are almost entirely Hindu.
An elderly woman called Jetun Appa pushed a pair of smart but uncomfortable bifocal glasses back on the bridge of her nose and said, ‘The police are as bad as the gangs. They come and break down the doors of our homes saying they are searching for bad characters. This time they broke the windows of the scooter-rickshaws our men drive. They also broke the screens of the television sets of anyone who had them.’
‘Did the police loot your houses or steal any of your property?’ I asked.
‘What property?’ she shot back. ‘We don't have any.’ The others broke into laughter, but the elderly lady was not amused. ‘This time the police arrested my brother for being out during curfew. He was arrested for two days. We could only get him out by giving the documents for our home as a security. If we complain, the police beat us. Now we can laugh about it – then we were crying.’
Hasina said, ‘This time nothing happened. Last time, in my mother's house, my brother was arrested for trying to take out his scooter-rickshaw. He was held for five days and we only got him out with the help of the ladies who run SEWA. The police bashed his head against a wall, and beat his knees so that he couldn't walk for two days when he was released. We had to massage him for two days.’
The elderly and irascible Jetun Appa said, ‘We women have to go out to buy what we can during the curfew breaks, because it's not safe for the men to go out. If we are late back, the police make us sit on the ground in the open sun. They make us stare into the sun. They also make us say we are sorry – toba, toba!’ She pulled her ears – the Islamic sign of repentance – and went on, ‘If they catch a man, they make him walk home carrying his bicycle above his head.’
Apparently, during these riots a group of women had insisted that the police arrest them along with their men. The police lacked the courage to cope with them and ran for it, leaving the men behind.
I assumed that it was the Muslims who were the targets of the police, but Jetun Appa put me right on this. To my surprise, she said, ‘They treat the poor Hindus just as badly. It's always the poor who are killed in riots, and it's always the poor who suffer the police zulum [atrocities]. If a Muslim is killed, they go for the innocent Hindus. If a Hindu is killed, they go for the innocent Muslims.’
When curfews are imposed, the local administration as a routine practice announces that arrangements have been made for the distribution of essential supplies, but I can never remember reporting a curfew where essential supplies were effectively distributed. So I asked the women about this.
‘We received nothing,’ said Jetun Appa – who seemed to have appointed herself as the spokesperson-in-chief. ‘We couldn't even get limes to make sherbet. We have to end the fast each day with lime sherbet and dates. We couldn't get them, although according to Islam we should take them to end the fast each day.’
‘We couldn't even get bananas,’ said a younger woman called Hanifa, who was the comedienne of the party. Everyone roared with laughter, because it's the privilege of the toothless to break their fast with that fruit.
Jetun Appa took up the tale again. ‘We had to break the fast with plain salt. That too is permitted in the Koran if it is all you have. We had no money to buy the children new clothes for Id [the festival] and they couldn't understand so they all cried, and we couldn't tell them we had no money. Even though it was Ramzan, the men were not allowed to go to the mosques for prayers. They used to sometimes gather in each other's houses, but that was all. Sometimes the men could get to the smaller mosques down the galis [alleys], but there were no prayers in the big mosques.’
I then moved on to the subject which interested me most. ‘In the newspapers, you read that these riots are communal – between Hindus and Muslims. But they must start somehow. Who starts them – the Hindus or the Muslims?’
She replied, ‘It's nothing to do with Hindus or Muslims. It's all politicians. When the Congress comes to power, the Bhajpa [Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP] does it. When the Bhajpa comes to power, the Congress does it. It's just to give the new government a bad name.’
‘So this time the Congress did it, because they had just been routed in the election to the Gujarat state assembly?’
‘Yes, yes! That's what the public says,’ they all replied. ‘We are not going to vote for anyone any more, and if we had our way we wouldn't let anyone sit on the throne.’
‘But the politicians don't do the rioting, surely?’
Hasina said, ‘The big people, they give money to the small people, the goondas [thugs], and they start the rioting. It's very easy to start riots by killing people and spreading rumours. The big people do it to give a bad name to the government in the chair; so that, as we have said, is why the public blames the Congress this time.’
Hanifa, the comedienne, interjected angrily for once, ‘How can it be Hindus and Muslims? We sit together all the time and we work together. There are lots of Hindus in this cooperative. We live in the same areas. Even in the curfew we go from one to another's house. Then when the riots stop, always suddenly, everything is as it used to be.’
‘Yes,’ the women agreed, ‘How do they stop if we are such enemies of each other? It's the same Hindus and Muslims who are meant to hate each other who are again living together now.’
I was fascinated by the openness of these Muslim women, who just a few years ago would never have talked with such familiarity to a man outside their immediate family circle – especially not to a foreigner. I wanted to ask them about family planning, because I had never discussed this with Muslim women before, but I thought that would be presuming too much on their open-heartedness and generosity of spirit. Then I had an idea. One of the charges levied against Muslims by those Hindus who want to stir up communal hatred is that their clergy deliberately encourage them to have large families to increase the Muslim population – a similar accusation is made against Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland. I thought that I would put this allegation to the printers and see where it led.
They all thought about my question for a moment and then Hasina's sister said, ‘Most women do still have larger families. Our mother had ten children, but then she was brought up to be very traditional and to accept that the Koran says family planning is bad. Now some of us have changed. I had twins six years ago, and haven't had any children since.’
Not surprisingly, the young Hanifa was the most direct in her approach to this matter which I had thou
ght would be so delicate. She said, ‘We all know about family planning, and if we want to we adopt it. If an elderly person asks us why we are not having more children, we tell them, “We don't know. Perhaps it's the will of Allah.” But we don't favour the operation. We make our own arrangements – like taking pills. All the men are actually happy, because, once you have a son, who wants a big family in these days of such expenditure? But our men don't want to ask us about it.’
‘Don't the mullahs preach against family planning?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Hasina's sister replied, ‘but they don't even allow their women out of the house very much. If they do go out, they have to wear burqas. We don*t pay attention to them. That's not because we are not good Muslims,' she continued hurriedly, so that I didn't get the wrong impression – ‘we are. We all say our prayers together when we are at work. We keep the fast in Ramzan. We show respect to our men. We wear gold nosepins and bangles to show that we are married, and we take them off if our husband dies.’
‘Everyone wears gold except me,’ said Hanifa with a laugh which showed no trace of shame or jealousy. ‘My ornaments are artificial.’ Then, running her bangles up and down her arm, she laughed again and said, ‘But they look like gold, don't they?’
SEWA has organized women workers in many other crafts and trades too. One of these crafts is the sewing of khols, or patchwork sheets, made from the unwanted rags of the Ahmedabad mills. Khols are another example of India's refusal to allow anything to go to waste, but they are more than that – a top-quality khol is a work of art. Khol-sewers work at home, and so I thought that a visit to a woman in that line of business would give me a chance to get a better impression of the hardships of curfew that the hand printers had described. They referred me to Fatima Bibi, who lived near Prem Darwaza, or the gate of love.