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A burned room inside a house in Lisarh village of Muzaffarnagar district, Uttar Pradesh.
KANDHLA and LISARH, Uttar PradeshMore than three weeks after deadly sectarian violence broke out in the Muzaffarnagar district of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, cases of sexual violence against women during the rioting are beginning to surface. Only five such complaints have been taken up by the police so far.
Three cases of rape and two cases of molestation from Fugana village are being investigated. We received information about these just two days ago, said Kalpana Saxena, a superintendent of the police in Muzaffarnagar district, in a phone interview on Sunday.
Two hundred F.I.R.s have been filed and 800 people have been arrested, mostly on charges of murder, arson and loot, she said, referring to first information reports, or police complaints. Since the riots began on Sept.7, 49 people have died and 42,000 have been displaced, according to official statistics. The displaced include Mohammad Yamin, 55, who sold iron gates in Lisarh village, 75 miles north of New Delhi, and his family.
Mr. Yamin, who lived with his wife, four sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren in Lisarh, was among the estimated 2,000 Muslims who had lived side by side with the Hindu Jat community for decades. The Jats, a dominant caste in the village of 12,500 people, owned the land. The Muslims worked as laborers or ran small businesses.
As the violence escalated in Lisarh, on the night of Sept. 7, Mr. Yamin and his wife stayed behind as the rest of his family left the village to find shelter and safety in the nearby town of Kandhla.
The next morning, Mr. Yamin rode out of Lisarh to join his children in a refugee camp in Kandhla. His wife refused to accompany him. She insisted on staying behind. She told me things will calm down in a couple days, he said. She wanted to watch over the house, guard the jewelry and four boxes full of valuables, including three that their three daughters-in-law had brought in marriage and the things they had been collecting for their 15-year-old granddaughters trousseau.
Around 11 a.m., Mr. Yamin spoke to his wife on the phone from the Kandhla refugee camp, where he now lives. She told me everything was all right, he recalled during an interview.
A little later, his phone rang again. A neighbor, who lived in a house adjacent to his, called to say that a group of men armed with guns, sickles and swords had surrounded Mr. Yamins house. His wife was inside. Alone.
How could I have gone back to rescue her with those armed men waiting at my door? he added in a soft, defeated voice.
Two neighbors witnessed from the adjacent house what happened after the armed mob circled Mr. Yamins house. Baldhari, a mason, and his brother, Naresh, both from the Jat community and who go by their first names in the village, narrated the horrors of the killing of Mrs. Yamin to her husband.
When she saw the attackers coming, she tried to climb a stairway to seek refuge in the house next door, Mr. Yamin recounted what his neighbors told him. She had polio and diabetes, and the two conditions made movement difficult and slow for her.
They dragged her down, violated her and burned her alive inside, he said. As he spoke, he held his head low and crushed a tiny twig between his fingers.
One of his four sons returned to visit their house in Lisarh the next morning. He found cinders. There was no sign of his mothers body. His fathers shop was burned, too. The family has filed a complaint with the police in the Kandhla police station.
Lisarh and the villages of Kutba, Kutbi, Lank and Bahawadi were among the villages worst affected by the violence in Muzaffarnagar. Most of those who fled their homes fearing for their lives were Muslims. They sought refuge in makeshift camps, 39 of which are spread across Muzaffarnagar and the neighboring Shamli district.
Multiple narratives have emerged about the origins of the riots, but the common thread is three killings in Kawal village of Muzaffarnagar district on Aug. 27. One account states that two Jat men killed a Muslim man who allegedly stalked their female relative. The slain mans family retaliated by killing two Jat men. Another version maintains that the killings followed a dispute that erupted when the motorbikes of a Jat man and a Muslim man collided.
Tensions rose in the area after the three deaths. On the morning of Sept. 7, thousands of Jat farmers returned from a council meeting held near Kawal village, which was attended by local politicians and community leaders, and violent clashes between the two communities followed.
Noor Saleem Rana, a legislator of the Bahujan Samaj Party, and Sangeet Singh Som and Suresh Rana, two legislators of the Bharatiya Janata Party, were arrested for allegedly making inflammatory speeches. Uttar Pradesh police officials said that they are still investigating the exact sequence of events that led to the rioting. The police and the Indian army were able to control the violence after a few days.
The social stigma attached to rape, especially in rural India, has kept the victims and their families from reporting sexual violence during the riots. In a house near the Kandhla camp, a mother of five girls spoke about it in hushed tones, insisting that her identity be protected.
The woman from Lisarh village, who wore a salwar kameez, covered her head and most of her face with her dupatta, a traditional scarf, except her dark, kohl-lined and moist eyes.
On Sept. 7 around 10 p.m., a group of 10 to 12 armed men raided her house. She was inside with her children when the armed men held a gun to her husbands chest as he was lying on a string cot in the courtyard.
The attackers entered the house and dragged the women by their hair. I started crying, she said. The family ran outside the house, but two of her daughters, aged 17 and 18, went missing for hours. A community member found them on a village street.
My daughters had a fever for several days. They told me what had been done to them, she said in a withered voice. They were undressed and beaten on the chest repeatedly. They raped my daughters.
I had no money to take them to a doctor, she said.
She broke down as she mentioned that both the daughters had been engaged. One of the fiancés broke the engagement after he heard the girl had been raped. She feared that her other daughter could also meet the same fate.
How will my daughters get married now? she said.
Her husband, a mason, had suffered a heart attack recently, and ever since the family has had no steady source of income. Over the years, the mother had collected jewelry for her daughters marriage, which was left behind in the house when they fled. And the attackers burned their house.
I had kept 15-16 things for each of my daughters, she said. Gold earrings, silver bangles, toe-rings, anklets, locket, necklace, she counted as she gestured with her hands where each piece of jewelry is worn.
I cant afford to give them anything now, she said. I will have to beg.
Victims of the violence said repeated phone calls for help from the local police station in Fugana, which is only a short distance away, went unanswered. Yet in the mayhem, tales of humanity and courage emerged. Nafisa, 50, another woman from Lisarh was in her house with her husband, her brother-in-law and his wife on the night of Sept. 7. The younger members of their family had left earlier.
I felt the young women were under threat, but there was no reason for me to worry, said Ms. Nafisa, who uses only one name.
Ajeet Singh, 32, chief of Lisarh village, standing inside the courtyard of a burned house in his village.
At night they heard announcements on loudspeakers, which she alleges were made at the behest of Ajeet Singh, the village chief and another man who is a leader of a khap panchayat, an unelected, all-male council that dominates many rural regions of the state.
Hindus get together and kill them, Ms. Nafisa recalled a voice saying on a loudspeaker. I held my slippers in one hand, kept my mobile phone on silent mode and we ran toward the sugar cane fields near my house, she said.
One of her Jat neighbors, known as Babloo, who owned a dairy and supplied milk to some houses in the village, came to their rescue. He took Ms. Nafisa and her family in his car and drove them to safety to a refugee camp. Babloo, according to her, had saved about 150 Muslims of his village, ferrying them in his car. Had it not been for Babloo, I would have been dead, she said.
The village of Lisarh is ringed by canebrakes, poplars and lush green vegetation. Spacious houses, painted in bright colors and fitted with massive metal gates, decorated the meandering lane leading to the village. Wooden carts lay in several courtyards, and buffaloes filled their animal sheds. These were houses mostly owned by Jats, and none of those bore any signs of arson.
Ajeet Singh, 32, who has been the village chief for three years, sat on a cane chair in the shade of a neem tree in the roomy courtyard of his house, which had peach walls. A group of village elders smoked bidis on two string cots.
Mr. Singh denied any involvement in arson, vandalism, killings or rape reported from his village. I have heard newspapers are reporting that I am being accused, said Mr. Singh, a tall, mustachioed man, who wore a white kurta pajama and a pair of black slippers. But I dont know what the charges are, he said.
No one was murdered in our village, he said. No one misbehaved with the women of our village. It must have happened in other villages.
About 150 Muslim families lived in Lisarh, according to Mr. Singh. Some left on the seventh, some later, he said, while fiddling with his mobile phone.
He said he sheltered several Muslims in his house and made calls to the police and the army to stop the violence. He also contended that the Muslims left Lisarh after a rumor spread that the Jats returning from the Sept. 7 grand village council had killed some Muslims on their way back. I did not attend that meeting, he said. I dont know what happened there.
Mr. Singh added that a mob had descended upon Lisarh in farm tractors and was responsible for the looting and arson. I dont know who these people were, he said. Some of them must have been Jats from our village, but I dont know them.
However, he suggested that some Muslims burned their own power looms and others torched their own houses to get compensation from the Uttar Pradesh government.
A few minutes walk from Mr. Singhs house is a row of village shops. The only store that had been burned belonged to a Muslim vegetable vendor. A little ahead stood a house with charred doors and windows. The ceilings in most of its rooms had crumbled. Stray dogs foraged through a pile of clothes on the floor in a room. Fire had singed the steel bowls on a metal rack to pitch black.
A plaque by the burned facade bore a Muslim name: Yaseen Mohammed. Police officials said that 200 houses had been burned in Muzaffarnagar district.
Two weeks after the violence began, Yasin, 39, a Muslim man, who practiced Ayurvedic medicine in Lisarh, returned home from a refugee camp to look for some important documents. A group of people visiting from Delhi accompanied him. His house had been burned, but he managed to salvage some documents beneath a box.
Mr. Yasin, who uses only one name, recalled that some of his neighbors acknowledged him. Others did not bother, he said. He returned to the refugee camp.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/30/a-village-in-muzaffarnagar-recounts-rapes-and-murder/?_r=0
