A ROW of bodies with torn limbs, burnt faces and deep wounds, and most of them swathed from head to toe in bandages, lay in the bomb blast victims ward at the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad. Most of the 188 people injured in the serial blasts had been discharged. These were the severely injured lot. The doctors attending to them had little hope of their survival.
Kantibhai Hirabhai Prajapati, who suffered 70 per cent burns and was on life support, was surely not going to live through the night. A retired textile mill worker, he had a job at the hospital canteen. Prajapati was on his way home when the bomb planted near the trauma ward of the hospital went off. Twenty persons were killed. They have to make the laws more strict. They have to be much more tough on these people, Prajapatis son Vinod, who was reciting prayers by his fathers bedside, said.
Lying next to Prajapati with burn wounds was 26-year-old Sunil Kakade. Ironically, this young man had brought in a victim from another blast site to the hospital and became a victim himself. Kakade is on a long road to recovery. His tearful mother Usha said: He was just helping other people and almost lost his life. How can life be so cruel? Kakade supports his family of two children, wife and parents. While some relatives of the victims were livid, others agreed that Ahmedabad had been through enough and could not afford another communal clash. We saw what happened in 2002. Only the poor and helpless get affected. We cannot allow that to happen again, says Abdul Rehman, from Maninagar, whose father was injured.
If a backlash was expected, none came. This reporter went to some of the areas that were affected by the 2002 riots. It appears that the people of Ahmedabad, and perhaps the rest of Gujarat, are deeply scarred from those events and would not like to see a repeat of them on any scale.
As soon as the news of the blasts reached Naroda-Patiya, the residents ran indoors and bolted their doors. This was the worst affected area in 2002. A suburb of Ahmedabad, Patiya has a predominantly Muslim population. We kept coming out of our house to the main road to see if there was any reaction but it was very quiet, said Zannat Biwi, who lost five family members in the 2002 riots.
Then we heard the Army was patrolling the area so we felt safe and started normal life again. But we were scared. Now I feel nothing is going to happen. However, they have been coming to our houses to take details of family members and if anyone has visitors or had visitors. The police are troubling our boys. Every day they round up boys for questioning, she said.
Massive combing operations have been going on in the city causing much resentment in poor localities. For instance, in Maninagar, four youngsters who sold maps on the street were taken into custody and questioned.
They are using the blasts as an excuse to harass us, said Rajesh Rajbhoi, a map seller.
The one thing the blasts have done is that people have begun to question the Modi government. During his election speeches, Modi told people, that for the next five years they should sleep peacefully as he would be on guard. People want to know where he was when the terror strike happened, said Achyut Yagnik, of the Ahmedabad-based Centre for Social Knowledge and Action.
2002 was clearly state-sponsored, said Father Cedric Prakash of the Centre for Human Rights in Ahmedabad. This time there was no violence because people, like the Chief Minister himself, were taken by surprise and there is no ulterior agenda such as elections. Modi had no reason to instigate trouble, he said.
However, many people wonder why Modi did not use the situation to his advantage as he did when the train was burnt in Godhra.
Well-known Islamic scholar Asghar Ali Engineer says, Modis behaviour was greatly different after the bomb blast. After the train incident he was worried about the coming elections. If Modi had employed his Hindutva rhetoric as he did after the train incident, one shudders to think what would have happened. How many more innocent people would have lost their lives!
Anupama KatakamCOMMents
COMMents
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