A Template for Violence
FIFTY YEARS AGO, Syeda Bibi did not own a shop. But she was happy. She was 31 years old, stayed at home and looked after her three children, while her husband made a modest income repairing cycles. They lived in a small house a few metres away from the Malek Saban Dargah, in Ahmedabad’s Bapunagar. “I lived here when Bapunagar was wilderness,” Syeda said, as we sat on a cot in her current home, inside the dargah compound. “There were no buses, no proper road, and when we wanted to go to the bathroom, we had to go behind some bush.”
Syeda lived with her extended family in a settlement of mostly Muslims that had a small number of Hindu homes scattered in between. The family knew their Hindu neighbours, borrowed milk and salt when supplies ran low, and their children played together. “We never imagined anything would happen,” she said.
In the third week of September 1969, Syeda’s family heard that people were pelting stones just outside their settlement. She could not hear any disturbance, but a relative told her that Hindus were attacking Muslims. Without pausing to think, she grabbed her three children and ran. Hiding behind bushes and trees, she made her way to Ansar Nagar, a nearby settlement where she had relatives. Just as she reached, though, she heard a mob approaching. People were marching into the area with swords. So she began to run again.
“Take the child!” someone shouted. In her panic, Syeda had forgotten her youngest daughter. She turned around, picked up the child and began to run again. As she passed a small dargah, a group of people urged her to come seek shelter with them inside the shrine. Finally, she had a moment to think. She sat down. And then, it dawned on her—she had no idea where her husband was.
Syeda’s panic worsened. She rounded up the children and, once again, began to run. She hurried down the road to her father’s house—a safe place at last. She stayed there with the children for a couple of days. Her husband, who had found temporary shelter during the chaos, finally made his way back, unscathed. It was more than she had hoped for.
But before long, the attacks began again. Sword-wielding people appeared near her father’s house. Her father gathered the family and rushed them to the nearby Kumar Chawl. But the mobs appeared there, too. The family fled again, to Shahibaug. Syeda had fallen ill by the time they took shelter here. She had not eaten in a week.
Perhaps a day after they reached Shahibaug, the family heard an announcement through a loudspeaker outside. The residents of Bapunagar who wished to return were being bussed to a camp at the Malek Saban stadium in Bapunagar.
Syeda could finally stop running. Along with her husband and her children, she spent a week at the relief camp. They slept under a big tent with what she imagines must have been thousands of people. They were given food and water and, in a strange way, it seemed as though the world was settling down.
At the camp, Syeda heard that “Indira Gandhi was allotting houses” in her old neighbourhood, so she decided to return home. As she approached her house, Syeda froze. She could not believe what she saw. The walls of her house had been stoned. The doors had been torn down. All of her possessions, from the beds to the salt, had vanished. “It was as if they swept the house clean after they looted it,” she said.
ALMOST EXACTLY fifty years ago, in September 1969, Gujarat experienced the worst communal riots the country had seen since Partition. Although incidents of violence erupted in different parts of the state, Ahmedabad, the epicentre, was the worst affected. After the riots ended, a commission led by Supreme Court judge P Jaganmohan Reddy was tasked with producing a report on what had caused the riots, how the administration had responded and what might be done to prevent such incidents in the future.
According to the Reddy commission’s report, more than 660 people died in Ahmedabad, with many bodies left unaccounted for, either because the bodies were in no condition to be retrieved, or because the deaths were never reported to the police. It is likely the death toll in reality rose to somewhere between one thousand and two thousand.
Although the exact figures could not be documented at the time, the majority—at least 430 people—of those who died were Muslim. More than a thousand people were injured in the city and, according to the then government of Gujarat, 37 mosques, 50 dargahs, six Muslim graveyards and three Hindu temples were damaged. Property worth over four crore rupees was destroyed, more than three quarters of which belonged to Muslims. Houses and businesses were looted, and many people left their neighbourhoods to live closer to those of their own religion—it was the beginning of a long process of ghettoisation, which would fossilise in the city through the decades.
The 1969 Gujarat communal riots were considered the most severe post-Partition riots in the country, until the Bhagalpur riots in Bihar twenty years later. Since 1969, Gujarat has periodically witnessed intense riots, almost every decade, all the way until 2002. Almost five decades from this watershed event, I went to Ahmedabad in July this year to speak with some of the people who had lived through that time. Several people’s memories have now mingled with those of later riots, and different people described the 1969 riots with differing degrees of ferocity.
But through all their testimonies, 1969 emerged as a kind of beginning—of intense religious division, a culture of violence, and the early rise of Hindutva in the state. The rhetoric that spurred and took root in the 1969 riots seems to echo in the politics of Gujarat, and other parts of the country, even today.
THE AHMEDABAD OF 1969 , which flanked the Sabarmati river—as the city does today—can generally be divided into three parts.
First, there was the old, walled city on the eastern bank. Small clusters of buildings, known as lay within the boundaries of a fifteenth-century wall, which was
