INDIA: While Politicians Wrangle, Gujarat Survivors Await Help

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 29 2002 (IPS) - As India’s politicians wrangle for political mileage from a pogrom against Muslims in western Gujarat state two months ago, scorching summer temperatures and disease stalk some 150,000 people who fled their homes, say volunteer groups.

These people now live in open-air makeshift camps, where conditions are fast deteriorating and humanitarian help is sorely needed.

On Tuesday, Parliament will debate and then vote on the future of Gujarat, where a pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government led by chief minister Narendra Modi stands accused by voluntary organisations and opposition parties of being behind the pogrom against the Muslims in the state — and then blocking humanitarian relief to the survivors.

At the national level, the BJP is desperately trying to keep together the 23-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA), many of whose regional constituents have bitterly criticised their major partner for its handling of the Gujarat crisis.

“Forgotten,” said Dr P V Unnikrishnan, “is the plight of over 150,000 internally displaced people living in insecure conditions and in inhumane relief camps”.

Unnikrishnan is main coordinator for emergencies and humanitarian action with Oxfam (India), which released Monday an independent report called ‘Gujarat Genocide 2002: A Humanitarian Crisis’ and carrying the subtitle ‘Waiting for Peace, Justice and Relief’.

“Unending violence, constant terror, official apathy and uncertainty make their (Muslim victims) future fragile. There is an urgent need to step up humanitarian efforts,” said the report, facilitated by the Bangalore Initiative for Peace and Relief.

Unnikrishnan says that not only was the Gujarat government not providing adequate relief to the inmates of the camps but it was preventing voluntary groups from providing it.

“This is in contrast to last year’s devastating earthquake in Gujarat, when the same government encouraged voluntary agencies, including foreign ones, to liberally provide relief,” he said.

International groups with medical expertise like the Red Cross and the Paris-based Doctors Without Borders, which were active in the days and weeks after the Jan. 26, 2002 earthquake that leveled Gujarat, are conspicuous by their absence this time around.

Yet there is a constant threat of epidemics breaking out.

Thus far, the partisan attitude of the BJP government in Gujarat has strained relations between the party and its secular allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which rules India at the national level.

Already, one allied political party, the Lok Jan Shakti, has announced that it will vote against the government. Its leader, Ram Vilas Paswan, announced Monday his resignation from the Cabinet of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in protest of the unabated violence in Gujarat.

Paswan, a powerful grassroots leader and a ‘dalit’ (a member of India’s lowermost caste in the Hindu social hierarchy) had two weeks ago written to Vajpayee and urged him to sack Modi for his role and that of the Rashtriya Swasevak Sangh (RSS) or National Self-help Organisation, which its critics call fascist, in the pogrom.

But many believe that Paswan’s resignation was prompted by the BJP’s forging of an expeditious alliance with his rival ‘dalit’ leader Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party or People’s Socialist Party, in order to rule India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh.

Despite irreconcilable differences between between the ‘dalits’ and the high-caste people who support the BJP, Mayawati was sworn in as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Monday evening.

She has already pledged that the 13 members of Parliament from the BSP will vote in the government’s favour on Tuesday.

Those votes from a newfound ally are crucial for the BJP at a time when several constituents of the National Democratic Alliance have said that they plan to abstain from voting to show that while they support the government, they oppose its blatantly fundamentalist stand on Gujarat.

Dissenting NDA partners include the Telugu Desam Party, which rules southern Andhra Pradesh state, and the Trinamul Congress from West Bengal.

Southern Tamil Nadu chief minister Jaylalitha said her AIADMK party would abstain because it was “not proper” for the chief minister of one state to demand the resignation of another chief minister.

While most regional parties have disassociated themselves with the BJP’s communal agenda and declared themselves to be secular, their main rivalries are with the powerful opposition Congress party or, like the Trinamul Congress, with the Left-wing alliance that rules West Bengal state.

The All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), which has taken a leading rule in relief and rehabilitation work in the camps, has released a separate report on conditions in them and in areas of Gujarat affected by the violence.

” Even as the pogroms continue, and scarcity and insecurity stalk the camps, thousands of men women and children are rendered refugees in their homeland,” the AIDWA report said. “In many cases, return to their homes is impossible, and in almost all instances, the means of livelihood and survival of all the victims have been destroyed.”

Most of the reports indicated a pre-planned campaign against prosperous Muslim homes and businesses and recorded the large-scale rape and sexual abuse of Muslim women and the killing of their men.

“Our visits to the affected areas and the interactions with the affected communities have been a traumatising experience. No words can describe the agony and suffering inflicted on them,” said Dr Thelma Narayan, a leading epidemiologist and member of the Bangalore Initiative.

“We saw a number of patients complaining of ill-defined symptomatic complaints as well as sleeplessness, irritability and fearfulness,” added Srinivasa Murthy, another member of the Bangalore Initiative’s team and a mental health expert.

Murthy, who was chief editor of the World Health Organisation’s World Health Report 2001, says the psychosocial needs of the affected require urgent action. ENDS-IPS-AP-IP-CR-HE-RDR-02)

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INDIA: While Politicians Wrangle, Gujarat Survivors Await Help

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 29 2002 (IPS) - As India’s politicians wrangle for political mileage from a pogrom against Muslims in western Gujarat state two months ago, scorching summer temperatures and disease stalk some 150,000 people who fled their homes, say volunteer groups.
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