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Carnage in Gujarat: Citizens’ Initiative for Justice & Peace
Update   March 9, 2002
 

Gujarat government evades relief, rehab responsibility

 

Teesta Setalvad                     Father Cedric Prakash                      Sushobha Barve    

 

 

AHMEDABAD: Though a week has passed since the brutal violence began in Gujarat, and even the day before yesterday we had mass stabbings in a village of the Muslim minority barely half-a-kilometre outside Ahmedabad, the state government has simply refused to take charge of the rehabilitation of 35,000 displaced citizens. Nearly one and a half dozen relief camps in the city are being entirely manned by the community leaders with some help in relief coordination from NGOs. The conditions in these camps are pathetic.

 

Besides, many of these camps are out in the open without basic amenities and the citizens are experiencing great insecurity after the brutal experience that they have already gone through.

 

In the Vatwa camps, where one Mahesh Patel of the VHP has been identified as the chief instigator and accused in the violence that occurred on March 1, audio-cassettes with cries and howls of, ‘Maro, maro!’ (‘Attack, attack!) are played at night on loudspeakers even now to further shake the already terrorised residents.

 

Hence a group of concerned citizens from Gujarat and the rest of India has come together to appeal to Justice S.P. Bharucha to pull up the Gujarat government for first, failing in its primary duty to protect the lives and property of a section of it’s citizens, and, second, compounding this shameful laxity by not even bothering to manage the efficient dispersal of relief and then, rehabilitation.

 

In another important development, a well-cordinated group of citizens from within and outside Gujarat has decided on co-ordinated action in a series of proposed legal interventions related to the State Sponsored Genocide in Gujarat. At the outset, this group has opposed the appointment of the Justice KG Shah Commission of Inquiry on several grounds. The group is demanding the appointment of a panel of diverse and representative sitting judges of the High Court or Supreme Court from outside Gujarat to conduct the official investigation.

 

Eminent historian Professor KN Panikkar, on a two-day visit to Ahmedabad, visited relief camps and spoke to the survivors. He addressed a press conference in Ahmedabad today. We enclose the press statement: 

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