Areesh
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Mohammad Ilyas has a terrible reason to remember September 8, 2013.
It was a Sunday, and it was 9.30 in the morning.
The 37-year-old tailor and his Muslim family had barely woken when their home was surrounded by thousands of heavily armed Hindus baying for blood.
The mob waved swords, sickles, knives and guns as they tried to force their way into his house in Kutba village, just outside Muzaffarnagar in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
He shouted for his terrified wife Samina, their seven children aged two to 16, and his elderly parents to get up on to their roof for safety, but they came under a hail of stones and were forced to retreat onto his neighbour’s terrace.
“There were three thousand surrounding the house and we were jumping from one roof to another. We were on the roof when my mother was shot. She died on the spot and we had to leave her body behind,” he said.
By the time the army finally arrived three hours later, eight of Kutba’s Muslim villagers had been killed by their Hindu neighbours. They were among 69 people killed in a three-week orgy of murder, violence and rape which swept Muzaffarnagar and drove more than 50,000 Muslims from their homes. More than 30 children died from pneumonia, dysentery and fevers in the cold and muddy refugee camps they fled to.
On Monday polling begins in the Indian general election, the largest democratic exercise in history, and the predicted victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi has raised fears of yet more communal violence.
Mr Modi’s BJP has courted high-profile Muslims in recent months as part of its strategy to win in Uttar Pradesh – India’s most populous state with its largest Muslim population. But leaders of the ruling Congress Party, including Sonia Gandhi, have recruited some of India’s leading Muslim clerics to urge their followers to unite behind a “Stop Modi” campaign and warned that a Modi government will see more violence of the kind which devastated Muzaffarnagar. She has promised to boost jobs for Muslim youths and increase security in return for their support.
Mr Modi’s campaign has focused on his economic successes in Gujarat, where he has been chief minister since 2001, but he continues to be dogged by accusations that he failed to stop the massacre of more than 700 Muslims during the 2002 riots in his state.
Comments made by Amit Shah, one of Mr Modi’s closest aides, that the election was about revenge against local politicians who had sided against Hindus in last year’s violence, will likely stoke tensions.
“This election is about voting out the government that protects and gives compensation to those who killed Hindus … If you want revenge, vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party…It is about badla (revenge) and protecting izzat (honour),” he was reported to have said.
Mr Shah himself has been accused of murdering a Muslim man who was supposedly an Islamic militant. Mr Shah denies the charge.
His comments and the Congress Party’s “Stop Modi” campaign have turned the focus on India’s estimated 177 million Muslims –14 per cent of its population – who have its lowest incomes and literacy rates. According to opinion polls, the Muslim vote could influence the outcome of as many as 220 constituencies.
At Muzaffarnagar’s Basikala refugee camp last week, Mr Ilyas told the Telegraph his family’s lives and those of his neighbours had been destroyed by Hindus from the Jat caste, a tribe of peasant farmers traditionally regarded as fierce warriors, who had been incited by Mr Modi’s local supporters.
Five hundred of his former Kutba neighbours are now living in Basikala, just two and a half miles from Kutba, in makeshift tents on a patch of muddy scrubland and can never go home. As his wife Samina squatted in front of a clay stove and his seven children tumbled on a rope bed last week, Mr Ilyas claimed the local BJP candidate Sanjeev Baliyan was one of the leaders who had urged local Hindus to attack them.
“There had never been any problems before. The village head, a Jat, had assured us that nothing would happen in this village but when they attacked none of them came forward to save us.….They were shouting 'Muslims should go to Pakistan or Kabristan (the graveyard).’”
As Mr Baliyan campaigned among shopkeepers in the heart of Muzaffarnagar last week, he confirmed an incitement case had been registered against him but rejected the allegations. The violence had been provoked by the local Muslim MP who had urged attacks on Hindus as they left a rally, but the communities should now move on and focus on development.
“I’m telling people there is only development and it can only be given by Narendra Modi,” he said.
The violence which swept Muzaffarnagar had been sparked by a tragic local dispute between two families in Kawwal village, 25 miles from Kutba. Seventeen-year-old student Gaurav Tomar and his cousin farmer Sachin Talyan, both Hindus, stabbed to death 24-year-old Shahnawaz Qureishi, a Muslim clothes salesmen, as he left the mosque on Aug. 27 last year. They in turn were lynched by Muslim villagers as they fled the scene.
Their bodies, stripped and bloody, were shown in gory photographs in the Dainik Jagran newspaper the following day which caused widespread anger among Hindus.
Nasim Ahmed, Mr Qureishi’s uncle, a 75-year-old retired sugar factory mechanic, said the following day thousands of Hindus, led by BJP figures, rioted outside his home after the two young men who killed his nephew were cremated. At a meeting of Hindus in a nearby village three days later “they told the crowd to go on the rampage and kill Muslims,” he added.
“What happened on the 27th August was an incident involving young people who lost their tempers, but after the 27th was pure politics and exploitation. The BJP did it with their eyes on the election, they wanted to create a rift between the communities…Obviously, we’re in a fearful situation if he [Modi] comes,” he said.
The father of one of the young Hindu men who was killed, Bishan Singh Talyan blamed the local Muslim MP for the riots and said only the BJP candidate had supported his grieving family. “If Mr Modi comes to power this [violence] will stop because he knows how to control and keep the peace,” he said.
Next week’s election is now a contest between hope that a Modi government will revive the Indian economy and fear that his supporters will fuel communal violence.
Back at Basikala camp, Mr Ilyas, said he would like to cast his vote against the BJP leaders he blames for killing his mother, driving him, his family and neighbours from their homes and forcing them to live in cold and muddy refugee camps while they wait to rebuild their lives. But when he was forced to flee he was also disenfranchised. “We don’t have identity cards, so now I won’t be able to vote,” he said bitterly
Fear and loathing in India's Muslim heartland could decide general election - Telegraph
@DESERT FIGHTER @Khan_patriot @HRK @Armstrong @Emmie @Talon
@Windjammer Very much related to your thread mistreatment of Indian muslims. A must read article.
