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December 17, 2005

India: 11 Hindus Jailed For Life For Slaughtering Muslims

Yesterday, Islam Online reported that eleven Hindus have been given life sentences for killing 11 Muslims, including children and women, in the 2002 massacre of Gujarat, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were killed.

The background to this situation is complex. Originally, centuries ago, Hindu belief maintained that there was a temple of the Hindu king/deity Rama (the seventh avatar of Vishnu), at Ayodhya, the town of his birth, which is in Uttar Pradesh. According to tradition, when Muslims arrived in India, they built the Babri Mosque over the site of the Hindu Temple.

Though the historical evidence for the existence of Rama's temple is scant, many Hindus, particularly fanatical nationalists, believed the myth. The three main domes of the Babri Mosque were erected in the 16th century, assumed to be in 1528. They lasted until 1992, when fanatical Hindus stormed the mosque, and destroyed it entirely, with the intention of rebuilding the temple of Lord Rama, the Ram Janmabhumi (Birthplace of Rama) on the site.


The fanatics, also called collectively karsevaks, came from the membership of the Hindu nationalist parties the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Shiv Sena party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BBC states that as a result of this outrage, rioting broke out, which led to the deaths of two thousand people. "The bloodshed was viewed as the most serious threat to India's secular identity since independence in 1947".

By the start of 2002, the situation had calmed down on the surface, even though deep-seated tensions between the Hindu and Muslim communities never disappeared.

On 27 February, a train carrying karsevaks from a visit to Ayodhya was mobbed in the state of Gujurat, apparently by Muslims, who were blamed for setting fire to the train. At least 57 Hindu pilgrims died.

By 4 March, 2002, 700 Muslims people were recognised as being slaughtered in the ensuing violence which erupted in Gujarat, though the total figure is at least a thousand.

The convictions of the 11 Muslims was announced two days ago by Agence France-Presse on Thursday, December 15. The accused were convicted of hacking and incinerating eleven Muslims from the village of Ajanwa in Panchmahal district.

A court in Ghodra on Wednesday said that their victims had included five children and four women, whose bodies were thrown into a well. Two elderly people were burned alive.

Three other people who had been accused were given 10-year prison sentences, while 18 more were set free for lack of evidence against them.

The Indian government at the time of the massacre in Gujurat has received criticism from Human Rights Watch and others for not acting to prevent the killing. Islam Online states that the initial fire on the train, which initiated the resurgence of violence, has been declared by an official investigation to have been "an accident", backed up by a BBC report. The fire started within the train, there had been no reports of smells of accelerants, and people were cooking with stoves on the train when it caught fire. Justice Umesh Chandra Banerjee, who led the inquiry, said: "The possibility of an inflammable liquid having been used is completely ruled out as there was first a smell of burning, followed by then smoke and flames thereafter."

The issue of the destruction of the Babri Mosque and the "Birthplace of Ram" is still a source of conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India. On 5 July, 2005, five Islamists attacked the site of the Babri Mosque/Ram Janmabhumi, firing guns and trying to break through the wall cordoning off the site. The Islamists, who are thought to have been from Lashkar-e-Toiba, were killed in gunfire from the Central Reserve Police Force in a clash which went on for an hour. The terrorists had set off a bomb to destroy the fence, and in this blast, a HIndu pilgrim, Ramesh Pandey, was killed.

Lashkar-e-Toiba/Lashkar-e-Tayba are believed to have been responsible for the three blasts which happened in Delhi on October 29, which killed 59 people.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at December 17, 2005 1:55 PM

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