Muzaffarnagar riots leave scars that won't heal easily

About 20,000 displaced persons still live in camps against the UP government's wishes

On a sunny winter afternoon last week, 12-year-old Gulbaar drifted among the dusty pile of rocks that marked the graves of infants and children in a cemetery close to the camp called Malakpur. The camp houses more than 7,000 Muslims who have taken refuge here since violence broke out three months ago between Muslims and the Jat clan of the Hindus in the nearby districts of Shamli and Muzaffarnagar in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

One grave resting in the dry grass and bramble, a camp supervisor said, was of a 15-month-old baby, who had perished from the cold last month. Residents of this camp in the district of Shamli say that 22 children and four elders have died from the cold since November, which is disputed by state officials.

Squatting next to the mound, Gulbaar, who goes by one name, described how his four siblings squeeze together to keep warm while sleeping. “We survive by sticking to each other, but a lot of cotton is coming out of our old bedding,” he said. Gulbaar’s family left their home in the village of Kaserva in Shamli when clashes erupted on Sept 7 between Muslims and Hindu Jats in the sugarcane-producing hamlets of India’s most populous state, 150 km north of Delhi. Before they fled, Gulbaar recalled how he helped make crude weapons with sticks and sickles.

The clashes claimed over 60 lives and displaced more than 50,000 Muslims, who took shelter in camps like Malakpur. In Shamli, 16 families each received Rs 12 lakh as compensation for deaths of family members, and Rs 5 lakh was given to each of the 680 families from the worst-hit villages, who could not return home out of fear or because their property had been destroyed.

Wary of false claims, the state government imposed one condition for compensation: recipients could live anywhere but their home villages. While local officials say that this condition was in response to a steely resolve by Muslims to stay away from their Jat neighbours, civil society advocates contend that the policy permanently divides communities along religious lines because the majority of the displaced end up moving to Muslim-majority areas.

A six-member fact-finding team from the Centre for Policy Analysis based in Delhi, which visited Muzaffarnagar this month, wrote in their report that this policy could cause the “most enduring damage,” and has “in effect provided an incentive for ethnic cleansing.” 

Most people have moved out of the camps, having received the money to relocate, but between 10,000 and 20,000 who don’t qualify for compensation still remain, against the government’s wishes. They include Muslims who are fearful of their Hindu-Jat neighbors but cannot claim physical damages, as well as those who are merely angling for some cash.

This puts state government officials in an awkward position because while they do not want to give monetary relief to people they don’t see as victims, it is the children in the camps who suffer the most from the standoff, as winter’s chill sets in. Gulbaar described how frost seeped through the plastic sheets of his family’s tent and dripped on all of them. “Tip, tip, tip. That’s the worst bit. Everything gets wet and horrible,” he said.

Most of the Muslims still living in the Malakpur camp make a living as laborers in brick kilns or as farmhands. They said that fear of reprisals from their more affluent landowning Jat neighbors keeps them from returning home. State officials, however, say that most of the camp’s current inhabitants belong to villages that saw no violence.

“This is no longer a relief camp, but we cannot forcibly evict them on humanitarian grounds, especially during winter,” said Praveen Kumar Singh, district magistrate of the district of Shamli, in an interview on Friday. Singh said doctors who were regularly dispatched to the Malakpur camp had examined thousands of people, but found no one who had died from the cold. “Say if the cold made some illnesses worse,” he said. “Why are parents exposing their own children to such conditions when they can go back?”

He said that the government had been sending basic food supplies, milk and water to the camp but that it would stop doing so soon. Over the weekend, camp dwellers protested the dwindling government supplies, even though nonprofit groups and religious charities were sending the bulk of provisions.With the temperatures dipping, inhabitants of the camp are receiving warm bedding, donated from neighboring villages as well as religious charitable organizations. Waterproof tents and solar lights donated by Oxfam are already being used in some tents.

Several camp dwellers, some of who are staying with five to 10 children, said that they want to settle in Malakpur permanently since it is located in a Muslim-majority area of Shamli. Officials, however, dismiss this idea outright since the camp stands on protected forestland belonging to the Central government. They have been calling on its inhabitants to leave.

Close shelters

Harsh Mander, a human rights activist who was part of the team from Centre for Policy Analysis, criticized the government for attempting to forcibly close shelters, even though his team estimated that 20,000 people are still displaced in camps or staying with relatives. “Nobody wants to live in these camps,” he said. “They have genuine fears, and the government needs to create the safe environment for them to return.”

Local residents pointed out that the recent clashes were the first in the countryside in Uttar Pradesh since India gained independence in 1947. The intimate familiarity common in villages ended up deepening the sense of betrayal and loss after the violence, according to the team. For generations, Muslims have worked on sugarcane fields belonging to Hindu-Jats, but those in the Malakpur camp vow to never return to Hindu fields. Mohammed Shaukeen, 50, whose 4-year-old daughter died on Dec. 4, said he wouldn’t go back to their home in Baman Hedi village even if it means exposing his four other small children to freezing nights in the Malakpur camp. Shaukeen and his family lived in the Baghpat district, which saw sporadic instances of violence, but did not bear the brunt of the riots like neighboring Muzaffarnagar and Shamli.

Close to midnight, only the silhouettes of the tents were visible in the blinding darkness of the wilderness. Dilrooba and her three siblings slept under one duvet as water seeped into the plastic sheet hung above them, and the wind blew through the holes in the flimsy cloth walls. Across the camp, children burrowed in their bedding and clung to each other against the cold.

Three months after the riots, over 200 arrests have been made, including of local politicians of national parties like the BJP and BSP, for allegedly inciting religious violence, but conversations in the villages and towns of the riot-hit districts are still rancid with hate and accusations. And many of the villages where they once lived together are dangerously close to being cleansed of diversity. Even though he sat in a dusty cemetery, young Gulbaar was happy to talk about the games he once played with his Hindu friends after classes. But now, the fourth-grade student would rather be wet and chilled to the bone every night under a leaky tent rather than return home to patch up his friendships.