2002’s
season of hate has left a generation of Muslim girls with little prospect
but the dead end of the ghetto. Deepa A. reports
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Abandoned:
The carnage forced thousands to flee home and livelihood, seeking
safety in relief camps. They have still not been able to return |
| |
In a society that does
not want them, most here are too busy trying to survive to bother
with educating their children |
Zahirabanu Yunisbhai
sits on a couple of dusty, broken bricks outside her one-room house
in Millat Colony, Ahmedabad, helping her sister scrub the pots and pans
spread around them on the ground. The clothes they washed a few hours
ago flap on a line above their heads. An occasional cow, several goats
and a clutch of children, alternately wailing and smiling, amble along
the narrow path onto which the houses in the colony open.
The rented room
where the sisters and their parents live is piled with bundles of clothes
and bags along with a makeshift bed on which the girls do their sewing
and embroidery work. Between the two of them, they make about Rs 25
to 50 daily, more than what their father, a rag-picker, manages to bring
home most days. Their mother, a maid, cleans floors and utensils in
other people’s houses, chores her daughters carry out in their
own home.
Zahira studied till
Class IX in a school in Bhavnagar, where her family lived before they
moved to Ahmedabad in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots. “Only
the last exam was left,” says the 18-year-old. “I had passed
all the other tests.” But there was no question of her appearing
for the annual exam. Instead, she and her family spent that March in
a relief camp in Juhapura, Ahmedabad, where every second brought with
it tales of dismembered and burnt bodies and of women tossed around
like footballs and gang-raped.
Zahira’s
sister Najma, a quiet girl whose hair is tied back in a severe plait,
was in Class VII then. They haven’t discussed school with their
parents since the dhamaal, though both girls speak of how keen they
are to get back to school. But after they moved to Millat Colony, securing
a livelihood was the family’s main concern, and the money the
girls made from sewing became a necessity to keep the house running.
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Farzana misses school, but
her father cannot afford the fees |
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‘After such things,
how can we send our girls outside?’ asks Raziya. ‘Once you lose izzat, how can
you get it back?’ |
Like Zahira and
Najma, hundreds of girls in Gujarat gave up their education soon after
the carnage of 2002, in which over 1,000 people died, a majority of
them Muslim. (Activists put the death toll at double the official figure.)
While the state government made claims that the situation in Gujarat
was ‘normal’, thousands of families literally picked up
what remained of their broken homes and lives, migrated to areas were
they found safety in numbers and rebuilt what they could with no steady
source of income. Five years later, fear still has an almost tangible
presence in the road-less, school-less, hospital-less ghettos they have
been pushed into. In a society that does not want them, most here are
too occupied with the day-to-day business of survival to bother with
the education of their children, especially of their daughters in whom
the only investment they make is for a wedding. Many will not let their
girls walk up to the main road, though it may be just a kilometre or
two away.
The principal of
an Urdu-medium school in Ahmedabad, who requests that her name and that
of the school and its locality not be used, explains that parents have
shifted children out of “unsafe” areas. “Especially
with the girls, they feel it’s dangerous for them to travel. Anything
can happen. They prefer to keep the girls confined to their own locality.
If there’s no school in the area, then the girls don’t go
to school at all.”
Like Zabina Shaikh
Mukhtar, who lives two houses away from Zahira in Millat Colony. The
350-odd houses in the area were burned down in the riots and, like her
neighbours, Zabina and her family spent nearly seven months in a relief
camp in Juhapura’s Sankalitnagar municipal school before returning
to the settlement, reconstructed by relief committees. Zabina, who had
also been in Class IX, stopped going to school after 2002. Her old school
is, as she puts it, in a “non-Muslim area”, which she and
her parents clearly consider unsafe. “None of my friends went
back,” says Zabina, who now sews for a living, out of her home.
Adds her mother, Shameem, “Even now, whenever there is any tension
in the area, I can’t sleep. We don’t know when we will have
to run, and I feel worried all the time.”
Raziya Saiyed Ahmed,
also a resident of the colony, couldn’t agree more. Sitting on
the doorstep of her house, near her young daughter who is soaping clothes
under a tap, she claims no one wants to send their girls to schools
after the riots. “We heard all kinds of things then. After such
things, how can we send our daughters outside? Once you lose izzat [honour],
how can you get it back?”
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When
Do We Go Home: At an Ahmedabad relief camp |
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Several
children fought distressing odds to go back to school, only to
be waylaid by the cruelty of their classmates |
In Behrampura, an
area severely affected by the riots, 18-year-old Mousmina Vohra makes
kites, sitting on the floor of her neat, two-room house. She was studying
in Class x at the Anjuman-e-Islam school at Astodia when the riots happened.
“I didn’t appear for the Board exams,” she says. “My
centre was in a Hindu area and it wasn’t safe for me to travel
there. Anyway, all my books were burnt. What could I study?” She
and her family lived in a relief camp for a while and came back to the
neighbourhood, after it had been rebuilt by an NGO. In a story that
has become only too common, Mousmina’s father, who used to work
in a shop, found that his employers didn’t want to retain Muslims.
Depressed, he committed suicide, leaving his wife and three daughters
to fend for themselves. Today, Mousmina makes kites — as many
as 2,000 to 3,000 a day — earning about Rs 50 daily. As the kites
soar in the sky during Hindu festivals, their makers bury their own
dreams in a place from where there is no return. “I wanted to
study and become a doctor,” Mousmina says, her tone expressionless
as she rubs what is possibly noxious glue over paper and sticks.
Like Mousmina, many
find their lives following trajectories that at one time would have
been unthinkable. It doesn’t help that the state government has
failed to provide them even the most basic of infrastructure. In localities
where NGOs built houses for riot victims, such as Faisal Park, Bombay
Hotel and Vatva in Ahmedabad, there are only a handful of municipal
schools — if any — with poor facilities and inadequate staff.
In Juhapura, referred to today as a large Muslim ghetto, there are no
options for students after Class xii, says Shakeel Ahmad, administrator
of the Islamic Relief Committee, Gujarat, and general secretary of the
Forum for Democracy and Communal Amity (Gujarat). “It’s
a little bit easier for boys to leave Muslim localities, but there’s
tremendous fear where girls are concerned,” he adds.
There are a few
private schools, but the fees are beyond the means of most parents.
Maijuddin Inamuddin Shaikh can vouch for that. He still gives his address
as Naroda, Hussain Nagar, though he today lives next to a hill of garbage
in Citizen Nagar, where a cluster of houses has been built for riot
victims. After surviving the massacre in Naroda Patiya, where over 80
people were killed, Maijuddin is now seldom able to put enough food
on the table for his three children. “In Naroda, I was driving
my own auto. Here, it’s a new place, I make just about Rs 50-60
a day, how can I send three children to school?” he says. It would
cost him Rs 9,000 every year to send all his children to the private
school in the area, the only option available. Farzana, Maijuddin’s
15-year-old daughter, went to the school for a while, but dropped out
after the fees proved to be too much of a burden. She studied till Class
v in Naroda and professes a distinct fondness for Gujarati. “I
wanted to be a doctor,” she says. “I miss school but I do
go for sewing classes.”
Gazala says she wants
to be in the police when she grows up. She is unable to say why,
but her mother knows and tears come to her eyes |
Several others fought
distressing odds to go back to school, only to be waylaid by the cruelty
and crassness of fellow classmates. Seventeen-year-old Farhana Farid
from Behrampura continued going to the Gujarati-medium municipal school
in her chawl even after the riots. “But the Hindu boys gave us
a lot of trouble,” she says. “They used to abuse us, so
I left. I don’t feel like going to school now. The teachers were
alright but they didn’t do anything about our complaints.”
Farhana, who is clad in a burqa, can now call herself only a ‘Class
VII pass’ and her ambitions have been limited to marriage and
running a household.
Afroz Baig of Samerth,
an NGO that works in the field of education and livelihood, says the
atrocities committed on girls in places such as Naroda continue to haunt
parents. “Earlier, parents would still send girls to school. But
that’s become rare now, all the girls wear burqas, and their parents
have them married at a very young age,” she says.
Yet, if there is
hope, it comes from some of those who saw the worst face of humanity.
Mehboobbibi Yusuf Ansari lost her husband and five other family members
in the massacre at Naroda. She now stays in Faisal Park with her daughter
Gazala, who is in Class ii at an English-medium school that is 15 minutes
away by autorickshaw. With the support of an NGO called Himmat, the
soft-spoken Mehboobbibi, who had once relied utterly on her husband,
is picking up the threads of her life, making friends in a new locality
and learning sewing. “People told me not to put Gazala in an English-medium
school,” she says. “They said the fees would be very high
and I wouldn’t be able to afford it. But she is very bright, and
her father is not there…” Mehboobbibi herself has only studied
up to Class v in a Gujarati-medium school, but is eager to ensure that
Gazala gets the best education possible. Her feisty daughter, who lists
science and mathematics as her favourite subjects, says she wants to
be an inspector when she grows up. Gazala is unable to articulate why
she wants to be in the police, but Mehboobbibi possibly knows and, listening
to her daughter’s words, tears well up in her eyes.
This
report is part of a study funded by the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt
Fellowship in Journalism
