A COURT in India’s western Gujarat state has found 23 men guilty of murdering nearly two dozen Muslims, including women and children, in sectarian rioting that erupted in the province a decade ago.
An equal number of mostly Hindu defendants were acquitted for their involvement in burning the Muslims to death in the small Gujarati village of Ode after bolting the doors of the house, where they had taken refuge from marauding mobs, then setting it alight. Nine women and nine children were among the 23 victims
Sentences for the 23 guilty men will be handed down on Thursday.
Rioting erupted in Gujarat in 2002 after a suspected Muslim mob burnt a train-load of 58 Hindu activists at Gujarat’s wayside station of Godhra, 100 miles from the state capital Gandhinagar.
The victims were returning from the north Indian town of Ayodhya, where extremist Hindus had been leading a campaign to build a temple to their warrior god Rama on the site of a 16th-century mosque that zealots had demolished in 1992. Many Hindus believe the mosque site to be Rama’s exact birth site.
Hindus blamed Muslims for the train fire and, seeking revenge, went on a rampage for three days through their neighbourhoods across Gujarat in a frenzy of violence.
Sporadic rioting continued in the state for at least three months in what was considered one of India’s worst outbreaks of sectarian violence. Tens of thousands of Muslims, their homes burnt and businesses looted, lived in refugee camps across Gujarat for months, too terrified to return home for fear of being attacked again.
No sooner would darkness descend in Muslim-populated neighbourhoods, especially the largest town of Ahemdabad, that Hindu mobs would emerge to begin their “ethnic cleansing”. Even secular Hindus harbouring Muslims were unsafe. In several areas, Hindus told Muslims they could return home only after forsaking Islam and shaving off their beards.
Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party – the main opposition to the federal government – was held responsible for failing to stop the violence.
Many activists, backed by media reports and human rights groups, accused Mr Modi of actively encouraging the rioting as a consequence of which he was denied entry to the US.
The Ode massacre was one of 10 key incidents being investigated by a supreme court-appointed special investigation team set up in 2008 after Mr Modi was blamed for obstructing investigations.
In November 2011, a court sentenced 31 people for burning 33 Muslims to death in another village in the state. In February, 31 people, many of them Muslims, were found guilty of setting fire to the Hindu pilgrim train at Godhra while 63 others were acquitted.
