(Indian Express
October 25, 2006)
The people of Citizen Nagar
by Farah Naqvi
Gujarat’s displaced Muslim families still await justice. Hopefully, the forthcoming report of the National Commission for Minorities will frontpage their plight
For four and a half years the internally displaced Muslims of Gujarat have braved the forgetfulness of a nation. Kicked out of burnt homes and shops, attacked by neighbours, too terrorised to return, over 5,000 Muslim families have lived, hidden from view, in 50-odd resettlement colonies, sliding into sickness and slow death. But now, their truth is being told. The National Commission for Minorities not only visited these colonies recently, but has made public its intent to act. Finally, there could be hope that these Muslims who have existed in the twilight zone of no man’s land, will be allowed to reclaim their place as citizens; their sub-human conditions of survival judged against India’s constitutional promise to protect the rights of its minorities to live with dignity.
Spread across the districts of Panchmahals, Dahod, Sabarkantha, Anand, and in the cities of Ahmedabad and Vadodara, the colonies are like festering sores in the body politic. And the gangrene they have spread is the forced alienation and ghettoisation of a community. Not a single colony was constructed by the Gujarat government. Nor did the government allocate any land for their construction. Survey the signposts at the entrance to each colony and examine the list of organisations who have housed, clothed, and kept alive the Muslims who survived 2002 — Jamiat Ulema e Hind, Gujarat Sarvjanik Welfare Trust, United Economic Forum, Islamic Relief Committee. Each, with few exceptions, is a Muslim organisation and the message sent out by the Gujarat government is clear — when Muslims are in trouble it’s not our job to bail them out. Leave it to other Muslims to come to their aid. This kind of blatant discriminatory abdication of state responsibility spells disaster for the future of a secular democracy. A course correction is long overdue.
The colonies themselves are shabby cubbyholes. A single 120 sq feet room generally houses an entire family. But even as NGOs have tried to provide shelter, they simply do not have the resources to provide everything else. So there is nothing. No electricity, water, sewage, health centres, schools, approach roads, street lighting, no BPL ration cards, no alternative source of livelihood, nothing. All that the Gujarat government did was to declare relief camps closed in July 2002 and stop all aid, leaving thousands of internally displaced people to fend for themselves. Every subsequent attempt to make the state government aware of the needs of these colonies has been stymied and blocked. One camp organiser in Halol, Mehboob Bhai, visited the Gujarat Electricity Board (GEB) over 40 times over a period of six months before the Halol colony (of 201 houses) got electricity meters. But GEB did not so much as subsidise the electricity infrastructure. Even that the local NGOs had to do. In Modasa taluka (District Sabarkantha) 62 displaced families lived in tents, braving the rain and winter cold, for over four years. It was as late as 2005 that Janvikas, an Ahmedabad based NGO, encountered these survivors, and hurriedly constructed a colony into which they have moved just six months ago. In other colonies, local Muslim leaders have been harassed, slapped with false charges and even arrested. Their crime — they made too much noise, demanded too many entitlements from the state.
Displacement has meant pauperisation, robbing people of their traditional sources of livelihood. Many residents in these colonies once lived a better life. They were cattle traders and petty shopkeepers. Some of them owned tiny retail businesses, and had acquired small items of household comfort. Now they are all reduced to doing daily wage labour to survive. There has been no restitution, compensation or reparation by the state for its failure to protect their lives and property. Meet them, visit their homes, and look into their eyes, and you understand what the experience of violent pauperisation does to people; what it means to go from three square meals a day to one uncertain meal. This is the death toll that we forget to count, the death that comes slowly, with shrinking stomachs, low immunity and disease.
But for four and half years, these families have not allowed themselves to lose hope. One of the resettlement colonies in Ahmedabad is located at the base of one of the city’s largest garbage dumps. A dark hovel reeking with the smell of sewage waste that surrounds it, with nothing, except damp rooms and disenfranchised people. And yet, in perhaps their last desperate attempt to reclaim their space in the Indian nation, the people here have chosen to call it Citizen Nagar.
The article has been co-authored with Gagan Sethi. The writers have formally sought the NCM’s intervention in the matter of displaced Gujarat riot victims
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