INDIA: A State of Complicity
September 2002 – 19’55’’
REPORTER: Flavia Abdurahman
In Gujarat, another victim of violence is laid to rest. This man was killed the night before by a rampaging Hindu mob. The mourners haven't travelled far to pay their last respects, because like many graveyards, this one has also become a refugee camp. Since February, the Muslims of Gujarat have been the target of unprecedented brutality, often at the hands of those who are meant to protect them - the police.
WOMAN (Translation): They gave them liquor to drink and killed right before our eyes.
MAN (Translation) The police have committed an atrocity against us. Women were being taken away.
WOMAN (Translation): And they were terrorising everyone and shouting filthy abuse. They went into houses and started shouting They were all with the police. The police gave covering fire.
Murder, rape, houses torched, people burnt alive. Over 1,000 people have died and more than 100,000 have become refugees in their own land.
DR JOHN DAYAL, HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVITST: It's a violence against the people, against their women and children, displacing them in their tens of thousands and then it's a violence to ensure they will never rise again as a people.
In Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat, the refugee camps are home to people who used to live just outside the graveyard walls. But repeated attacks have forced them inside. The dead are now sharing their space with the living. The refugees are trying to make life as normal as possible, but there's no escaping the trauma. This little girl thought my silver camera was a gun and no-one could stop her screaming. In one corner of the camp, a widow, Nasim Banoo, has been provided with this house for her six children. The local police shot her husband at close range, three times, as he fled from advancing mobs. One bullet pierced these documents in his breast pocket.
WIFE OF VICTIM (Translation): The first bullet hit him in the stomach. The second one hit him here and he put his hands here. (Hands on chest) The third one hit him here (Pointing to head) and he fell down. Some people brought him in. Others ran away. He died on the spot.
The violence, which spread across all of Gujarat, began in late February, after this train carrying Hindu pilgrims was attacked by Muslims. One carriage was torched and 58 people died, mostly women and children. Hindu mobs responded with murder and arson. Four days later, India's then minister for Home Affairs, L.K. Advani, visited the burnt-out train with the State's Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, pleaded for calm and security.
L.K. ADVANI, MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS (Archive footage) Not only has the violence to be curbed, but a sense of security has to be communicated to all citizens of Gujurat. This is our responsibility.
His call failed to stem the attacks. India is no stranger to violence. For centuries, zealots have killed in the name of religion. But there's something very different about what's been happening in Gujarat. Dr John Dayal, seen here at a rally to end violence in Gujarat, is a human rights activist and president of the All-Catholic Union of India. Since 1968, he has studied 200 examples of riots or violence between Muslim and Hindu communities. He says the violence has been perpetrated by Hindus who were backed by the state government.
DR JOHN DAYAL: The violence was almost unilateral after the first incident, and secondly, the complicity of the state, the utter and absolute absence of the rule of law, marks it out from the rest of them.
WOMAN (Translation): There is no government here. They consider every Muslim and enemy. They're waiting there ready to attack us again. No woman is safe going back.
DR JOHN DAYAL: Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of places of worship, mosques and dargahs, were destroyed. Some were destroyed not by fire, but by bulldozer, and a road was built overnight. Could this be done without state enterprise?
Dr Dayal's analysis of state complicity in the violence is supported by a raft of recent investigations and fact-finding reports. India's National Human Rights Commission found: "...there was a comprehensive failure of the State to protect the Constitutional rights of the people of Gujarat..." Human Rights Watch in this report says: "...Even as attacks continue, the Gujarat state administration has been engaged in a massive cover-up of the state's role in the massacres..." As people took to the streets to protest at the slaughter in Gujarat, a leaked British Foreign Office report said: "The violence had all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing." The Indian Government responded coolly.
NIRUPAMA RAO, MINISTRY FOR EXTERNAL AFFAIRS (1 May 2002): We have already said that we reject interference in our internal affairs by the European Union or any other country through media leaks and slanted comments by unidentified foreign diplomats. As in any vigorous democracy, our institutions and our public opinion are involved in an open and free debate about events in Gujarat and self-corrective democratic processes are at work.
But the self-corrective processes didn't seem to be working. As the killings continued, there was uproar in India's capital, Delhi. The government narrowly survived a censure motion. Prime Minister Vajpayee claimed he hadn't realised unrest in Gujarat would turn into a slaughter. The PM's mea culpa rang hollow for many. Those who have studied the unrest say his own party, the right wing BJP, had played a major part in fomenting the violence.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH, CONFLICT MEDIATOR: They want to prove to the rest of the country that their ideology works, their ideology which is absolutely fascist, which is intolerant, which does not give room or space to any other thinking, to any other minority.
Father Cedric Prakash is the director of Prashant, a non-government organisation specialising in conflict management. He's received a national human rights award for his work and is well known in Ahmedabad where he tours volatile areas, intervening when violence begins. Parts of the city have been under curfew day and night. India is usually teeming with people. But here, silence reigns. Father Prakash blames the BJP-controlled state government for the violence.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH: They are engineering a genocide because they want to ensure that their brand, their ideology, which is called Hindutva, which means one nation, one race, one culture, one language, one religion, is in place here in the state of Gujurat.
The charge that the state government has engineered genocide in Gujarat is raised by at least two national non-government organisations in India. The Government of India has not yet responded to the genocide allegation. The ideology of Hindutva is promoted by key organisations like the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. The RSS training starts at an early age, in sessions like these, but includes Indians of all ages. It's a massive paramilitary-style organisation that peddles a potent brand of nationalism and has long been a political nursery for the ruling BJP. India's Prime Minister, deputy Prime Minister, and the current caretaker Minister of Gujarat have all been members of the RSS, along with millions of Indians.
RAM MADHAV, RSS DEPUTY NATIONAL SPOKESPERSON: We are trying to unite the Hindu society, we are trying to give them moral values, trying to make them culturally really strong, so that ultimately this country progresses and the country can progress only when the people have the feeling of patriotism in them so that is the main object to the RSS.
DR JOHN DAYAL: The RSS was born in almost identical circumstances as the National Socialists of Germany - feeding on paranoia, feeding on despair, feeding on joblessness, and building up images of a past which may have existed or which may not have existed.
The RSS runs schools and provides aid to poverty-stricken communities. But, according to Father Prakash, it also has a long history of supporting Fascism.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH: Today in the history books of Gujurat we have Hitler as a hero who lent dignity to the German people, gave them a sense of identity.
RAM MADHAV: It's this big figment of the imagination of some of these so-called secular intellectuals that RSS supported Hitler or something like that. There is absolutely no truth about it. RSS's concept of Hindu nationalism is totally different from Hitler's idea of Fascist nationhood and all that.
The RSS may deny their affinity for Fascism, but their ultra-nationalist fervour has fuelled the violence in Gujarat and their close ally, the VHP, also known as the World Hindu Organisation, is even more strident. They're another key player in Gujarat. They believe India's politicians favour minorities and the majority, 800 million Hindus are paying the price.
V.H. DALMIA, VHP INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT: Hindus, even though they are in the majority, but they are treated as secondary citizens in their country. And their problems are never attended to by the government and the political parties. So therefore, this organisation was formed to deal with these problems and to raise these issues and mobilise public opinion.
The VHP's ability to mobilise public opinion was tested in the city of Ayodhya in 1992, when a mob of their supporters stormed the Babri Mosque. The aim was to destroy this symbol of Islam. The battle that followed claimed 1200 lives and sparked a frenzy of violence across India.
V.H. DALMIA: No, no, no, we never incite violence. We never propagate violence. We only say, "You must be determined to fight for your rights. But not in a violent way. In a non-violent, democratic way."
L.K. Advani, now Deputy Prime Minister of India, shown here near the mosque, was reportedly involved in the attack. He later faced a special court charged with criminal conspiracy, trespass and intimidation of public servants. In May this year, the charges were dropped. He was the same leader who pleaded for peace at the burnt-out train. He and his BJP allies, including the Prime Minister, won power in India in 1999. They now hold 56 positions in the 77-member coalition cabinet.
DR JOHN DAYAL: They radicalised the country. They roused hidden passions. They raised, you could call it, a political army of supernationalist, religious people.
In 1998 the BJP took power in Gujarat and later installed Narendra Modi, another Hindu nationalist, as Chief Minister.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH: And since then, it has literally been no-holds barred for them, with no stops, they have just gone full-throttle. Full throttle is, first of all, they began Christian-bashing. They pulled down churches, they burned churches, they intimidated, the harassed the Christians. Then we've had the census on Muslims, on Christians and we've had the communalising of almost everything and anything.
There are suspicions that a secret census taken by police in 1999 provided authorities with detailed information on the Muslim community. That was later used to plan a comprehensive attack. This translation of a police document appears to confirm those fears. The document calls for details of Muslim organisations and their leaders, their names, addressed, total numbers, telephone, numbers. A campaign was clearly being orchestrated. When the mobs attacked, Hindu houses were left untouched, while Muslim houses right next door were destroyed. According to Dr John Dayal, the police tactics included isolating whole communities.
DR JOHN DAYAL: Sometimes they would impose a curfew in an area where there was a Muslim majority and not impose it in areas where there was a Muslim minority, so the mobs went and killed Muslims in the smaller ghettos and their brother Muslims could not even come to their rescue, because they were locked up in their houses in the curfew.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Chief Minister Narendra Modi told the BBC he's happy with the way his police have handled the situation.
NARENDRA MODI, CHIEF MINISTER: Not only enough, but excellent work they have done.
BBC REPORTER: Excellent work?
NARENDRA MODI: Excellent work they have done within 72 hours. We were able to control such violence.
BBC REPORTER: More than 500 people killed and you are calling this excellent work?
NARANDRA MODI: I'm not happy with what happened, but what we've done, I'm happy.
The Chief Minister may be happy but the Human Rights Commission begs to differ. Its report details how 50 people were burnt to death by a mob despite the police being informed that people were in danger.
EXCERPT FROM REPORT: "..Representatives of many Non-Government organisations and some prominent citizens narrated a number of cases where they contacted the police...but their pleas evoked no response."
The commission also heard testimony that State Government Ministers were present in police control rooms during the riots. According to Human Rights Watch: "A key state minister is reported to have taken over a police control room... issuing directions not to rescue Muslims in danger of being killed."
DR JOHN DAYAL: In Gujarat now, there is ample evidence that ministers took over police control rooms, they actually stood by in police control rooms and as the frantic calls for distress, SOS calls came in, their presence ensured that the police would not act.
Despite the evidence of the victims, expert observers, parliamentary censure and disturbing reports, the violence continues, if less intense than before. The Government of India has responded to the National Human Rights Commission, saying it's examining how to deal with the numerous cases of murder in Gujarat and that it's fully alive to the issue of police reform. But those who know Gujarat well fear that what's happened here may just be the beginning.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH: If it succeeds here in Gujarat, I am sure this same model will be carried to other parts of India and I'm afraid in many parts of India, it will succeed. India, I think, cannot and should not become a rightist, a fundamentalist state because once India turns its back on the parliamentary system of government, on democracy, I sincerely think that all is lost.
September 2002 – 19’55’’
REPORTER: Flavia Abdurahman
In Gujarat, another victim of violence is laid to rest. This man was killed the night before by a rampaging Hindu mob. The mourners haven't travelled far to pay their last respects, because like many graveyards, this one has also become a refugee camp. Since February, the Muslims of Gujarat have been the target of unprecedented brutality, often at the hands of those who are meant to protect them - the police.
WOMAN (Translation): They gave them liquor to drink and killed right before our eyes.
MAN (Translation) The police have committed an atrocity against us. Women were being taken away.
WOMAN (Translation): And they were terrorising everyone and shouting filthy abuse. They went into houses and started shouting They were all with the police. The police gave covering fire.
Murder, rape, houses torched, people burnt alive. Over 1,000 people have died and more than 100,000 have become refugees in their own land.
DR JOHN DAYAL, HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVITST: It's a violence against the people, against their women and children, displacing them in their tens of thousands and then it's a violence to ensure they will never rise again as a people.
In Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat, the refugee camps are home to people who used to live just outside the graveyard walls. But repeated attacks have forced them inside. The dead are now sharing their space with the living. The refugees are trying to make life as normal as possible, but there's no escaping the trauma. This little girl thought my silver camera was a gun and no-one could stop her screaming. In one corner of the camp, a widow, Nasim Banoo, has been provided with this house for her six children. The local police shot her husband at close range, three times, as he fled from advancing mobs. One bullet pierced these documents in his breast pocket.
WIFE OF VICTIM (Translation): The first bullet hit him in the stomach. The second one hit him here and he put his hands here. (Hands on chest) The third one hit him here (Pointing to head) and he fell down. Some people brought him in. Others ran away. He died on the spot.
The violence, which spread across all of Gujarat, began in late February, after this train carrying Hindu pilgrims was attacked by Muslims. One carriage was torched and 58 people died, mostly women and children. Hindu mobs responded with murder and arson. Four days later, India's then minister for Home Affairs, L.K. Advani, visited the burnt-out train with the State's Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, pleaded for calm and security.
L.K. ADVANI, MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS (Archive footage) Not only has the violence to be curbed, but a sense of security has to be communicated to all citizens of Gujurat. This is our responsibility.
His call failed to stem the attacks. India is no stranger to violence. For centuries, zealots have killed in the name of religion. But there's something very different about what's been happening in Gujarat. Dr John Dayal, seen here at a rally to end violence in Gujarat, is a human rights activist and president of the All-Catholic Union of India. Since 1968, he has studied 200 examples of riots or violence between Muslim and Hindu communities. He says the violence has been perpetrated by Hindus who were backed by the state government.
DR JOHN DAYAL: The violence was almost unilateral after the first incident, and secondly, the complicity of the state, the utter and absolute absence of the rule of law, marks it out from the rest of them.
WOMAN (Translation): There is no government here. They consider every Muslim and enemy. They're waiting there ready to attack us again. No woman is safe going back.
DR JOHN DAYAL: Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of places of worship, mosques and dargahs, were destroyed. Some were destroyed not by fire, but by bulldozer, and a road was built overnight. Could this be done without state enterprise?
Dr Dayal's analysis of state complicity in the violence is supported by a raft of recent investigations and fact-finding reports. India's National Human Rights Commission found: "...there was a comprehensive failure of the State to protect the Constitutional rights of the people of Gujarat..." Human Rights Watch in this report says: "...Even as attacks continue, the Gujarat state administration has been engaged in a massive cover-up of the state's role in the massacres..." As people took to the streets to protest at the slaughter in Gujarat, a leaked British Foreign Office report said: "The violence had all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing." The Indian Government responded coolly.
NIRUPAMA RAO, MINISTRY FOR EXTERNAL AFFAIRS (1 May 2002): We have already said that we reject interference in our internal affairs by the European Union or any other country through media leaks and slanted comments by unidentified foreign diplomats. As in any vigorous democracy, our institutions and our public opinion are involved in an open and free debate about events in Gujarat and self-corrective democratic processes are at work.
But the self-corrective processes didn't seem to be working. As the killings continued, there was uproar in India's capital, Delhi. The government narrowly survived a censure motion. Prime Minister Vajpayee claimed he hadn't realised unrest in Gujarat would turn into a slaughter. The PM's mea culpa rang hollow for many. Those who have studied the unrest say his own party, the right wing BJP, had played a major part in fomenting the violence.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH, CONFLICT MEDIATOR: They want to prove to the rest of the country that their ideology works, their ideology which is absolutely fascist, which is intolerant, which does not give room or space to any other thinking, to any other minority.
Father Cedric Prakash is the director of Prashant, a non-government organisation specialising in conflict management. He's received a national human rights award for his work and is well known in Ahmedabad where he tours volatile areas, intervening when violence begins. Parts of the city have been under curfew day and night. India is usually teeming with people. But here, silence reigns. Father Prakash blames the BJP-controlled state government for the violence.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH: They are engineering a genocide because they want to ensure that their brand, their ideology, which is called Hindutva, which means one nation, one race, one culture, one language, one religion, is in place here in the state of Gujurat.
The charge that the state government has engineered genocide in Gujarat is raised by at least two national non-government organisations in India. The Government of India has not yet responded to the genocide allegation. The ideology of Hindutva is promoted by key organisations like the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. The RSS training starts at an early age, in sessions like these, but includes Indians of all ages. It's a massive paramilitary-style organisation that peddles a potent brand of nationalism and has long been a political nursery for the ruling BJP. India's Prime Minister, deputy Prime Minister, and the current caretaker Minister of Gujarat have all been members of the RSS, along with millions of Indians.
RAM MADHAV, RSS DEPUTY NATIONAL SPOKESPERSON: We are trying to unite the Hindu society, we are trying to give them moral values, trying to make them culturally really strong, so that ultimately this country progresses and the country can progress only when the people have the feeling of patriotism in them so that is the main object to the RSS.
DR JOHN DAYAL: The RSS was born in almost identical circumstances as the National Socialists of Germany - feeding on paranoia, feeding on despair, feeding on joblessness, and building up images of a past which may have existed or which may not have existed.
The RSS runs schools and provides aid to poverty-stricken communities. But, according to Father Prakash, it also has a long history of supporting Fascism.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH: Today in the history books of Gujurat we have Hitler as a hero who lent dignity to the German people, gave them a sense of identity.
RAM MADHAV: It's this big figment of the imagination of some of these so-called secular intellectuals that RSS supported Hitler or something like that. There is absolutely no truth about it. RSS's concept of Hindu nationalism is totally different from Hitler's idea of Fascist nationhood and all that.
The RSS may deny their affinity for Fascism, but their ultra-nationalist fervour has fuelled the violence in Gujarat and their close ally, the VHP, also known as the World Hindu Organisation, is even more strident. They're another key player in Gujarat. They believe India's politicians favour minorities and the majority, 800 million Hindus are paying the price.
V.H. DALMIA, VHP INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT: Hindus, even though they are in the majority, but they are treated as secondary citizens in their country. And their problems are never attended to by the government and the political parties. So therefore, this organisation was formed to deal with these problems and to raise these issues and mobilise public opinion.
The VHP's ability to mobilise public opinion was tested in the city of Ayodhya in 1992, when a mob of their supporters stormed the Babri Mosque. The aim was to destroy this symbol of Islam. The battle that followed claimed 1200 lives and sparked a frenzy of violence across India.
V.H. DALMIA: No, no, no, we never incite violence. We never propagate violence. We only say, "You must be determined to fight for your rights. But not in a violent way. In a non-violent, democratic way."
L.K. Advani, now Deputy Prime Minister of India, shown here near the mosque, was reportedly involved in the attack. He later faced a special court charged with criminal conspiracy, trespass and intimidation of public servants. In May this year, the charges were dropped. He was the same leader who pleaded for peace at the burnt-out train. He and his BJP allies, including the Prime Minister, won power in India in 1999. They now hold 56 positions in the 77-member coalition cabinet.
DR JOHN DAYAL: They radicalised the country. They roused hidden passions. They raised, you could call it, a political army of supernationalist, religious people.
In 1998 the BJP took power in Gujarat and later installed Narendra Modi, another Hindu nationalist, as Chief Minister.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH: And since then, it has literally been no-holds barred for them, with no stops, they have just gone full-throttle. Full throttle is, first of all, they began Christian-bashing. They pulled down churches, they burned churches, they intimidated, the harassed the Christians. Then we've had the census on Muslims, on Christians and we've had the communalising of almost everything and anything.
There are suspicions that a secret census taken by police in 1999 provided authorities with detailed information on the Muslim community. That was later used to plan a comprehensive attack. This translation of a police document appears to confirm those fears. The document calls for details of Muslim organisations and their leaders, their names, addressed, total numbers, telephone, numbers. A campaign was clearly being orchestrated. When the mobs attacked, Hindu houses were left untouched, while Muslim houses right next door were destroyed. According to Dr John Dayal, the police tactics included isolating whole communities.
DR JOHN DAYAL: Sometimes they would impose a curfew in an area where there was a Muslim majority and not impose it in areas where there was a Muslim minority, so the mobs went and killed Muslims in the smaller ghettos and their brother Muslims could not even come to their rescue, because they were locked up in their houses in the curfew.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Chief Minister Narendra Modi told the BBC he's happy with the way his police have handled the situation.
NARENDRA MODI, CHIEF MINISTER: Not only enough, but excellent work they have done.
BBC REPORTER: Excellent work?
NARENDRA MODI: Excellent work they have done within 72 hours. We were able to control such violence.
BBC REPORTER: More than 500 people killed and you are calling this excellent work?
NARANDRA MODI: I'm not happy with what happened, but what we've done, I'm happy.
The Chief Minister may be happy but the Human Rights Commission begs to differ. Its report details how 50 people were burnt to death by a mob despite the police being informed that people were in danger.
EXCERPT FROM REPORT: "..Representatives of many Non-Government organisations and some prominent citizens narrated a number of cases where they contacted the police...but their pleas evoked no response."
The commission also heard testimony that State Government Ministers were present in police control rooms during the riots. According to Human Rights Watch: "A key state minister is reported to have taken over a police control room... issuing directions not to rescue Muslims in danger of being killed."
DR JOHN DAYAL: In Gujarat now, there is ample evidence that ministers took over police control rooms, they actually stood by in police control rooms and as the frantic calls for distress, SOS calls came in, their presence ensured that the police would not act.
Despite the evidence of the victims, expert observers, parliamentary censure and disturbing reports, the violence continues, if less intense than before. The Government of India has responded to the National Human Rights Commission, saying it's examining how to deal with the numerous cases of murder in Gujarat and that it's fully alive to the issue of police reform. But those who know Gujarat well fear that what's happened here may just be the beginning.
FATHER CEDRIC PRAKASH: If it succeeds here in Gujarat, I am sure this same model will be carried to other parts of India and I'm afraid in many parts of India, it will succeed. India, I think, cannot and should not become a rightist, a fundamentalist state because once India turns its back on the parliamentary system of government, on democracy, I sincerely think that all is lost.