INDIA: Stray dogs were the only residents left yesterday in a once thickly-populated neighbourhood of Ahmadabad. This follows clashes between Hindu and Muslim mobs in India's worst sectarian rioting for a decade. More than 500 people have died violently since Muslims massacred 58 Hindu activists last Wednesday.
The scrawny mongrels darted playfully in and out of razed homes and in between mangled heaps of bicycles and scooters littering the street of the poor suburb named after Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace and secularism.
Assassinated by a Hindu zealot in 1948 for his secular outlook and policy of appeasement to India's minority Muslim community, ironically Gandhi located his ashram dedicated to peace and communal harmony nearby. But to little effect. Communal violence in Ahmadabad has claimed nearly 10,000 lives since 1969.
For years Hindus and Muslims lived tranquilly in the Chicken Farm tenement houses alongside and opposite one another down the narrow, kilometre-long road. "There was harmony between the two peoples," said a Hindu shopkeeper, who returned home yesterday after the rioting which raged unchecked for 30 hours ended on Friday. But both communities here, like elsewhere in the city and across Gujarat state, went "haywire" following last week's massacre of Hindu activists returning from Ayodhya in the north, where they had gathered to build a temple to their god Lord Ram on the site of a razed 16th-century mosque.
The revenge killings began soon after, enveloping Muslim neighbourhoods in this city of over four million people.
"We were betrayed by the very people whom we looked upon as members of our extended family even though they were Hindus," Ms Ferorza Raes Ahmed said. "I saw my neighbour set my mother alight after dousing her with kerosene", she said from the safety of a refugee camp in an all-Muslim neighbourhood.
"During last year's earthquake we worked side by side with Hindus and thought that finally all communal animosity had been left behind," said Mr Gayur Alam Rajout, a social worker manning the Aman Chowk (Peace Crossing) Muslim camp.
The Peace Crossing is one of seven such camps across the city where nearly 20,000 terrified Muslims, chased out of their homes, are now living. Volunteers run community kitchens, while young men patrol boundaries fearful of another onslaught by Hindu mobs. "Under the prevailing tense conditions, riot victims feel safer in hospitals. Even after being discharged they request us for an extended stay," Dr Anil Chadha, head of the city's largest Civil Hospital, said. Meanwhile Hindu mobs that pulled down over 25 mosques in Ahmadabad have got Brahmin priests to "purify" the sites.
