"This Is All So Painful"

By Marguerite Johnson

Hindus and Muslims clash in bloody rioting around Bombay

The smell of fire and death was almost too much to bear, and an anguished Prime Minister Indira Gandhi pulled her sari over her mouth and nostrils. She stopped in Bombay and in town after town outside the city, comforting victims and listening to pleas for protection. "This is not the time to blame each other," she said. "This is all so painful. We must live in communal harmony. We must." The statistics of violence, following more than a week of fighting between Hindus and Muslims in the western state of Maharashtra, were stark reminders of how easily India's unity can be shaken. By the latest counts, 216 had died, 756 were injured, 13,000 were homeless, and 4,100 were under arrest.

Bombay, India's commercial and financial capital, looked like it was under siege as 6,000 army troops in full battle dress manned positions at key intersections in and around the city and guarded the airport and harbor. In the worst riot areas, a nighttime curfew was in effect, but it had come too late to halt the violence by roving bands of rioters, who had killed and maimed and burned. Hardest hit were the industrial towns of Bhiwandi, Thane and Kalyan, northeast of Bombay, where thousands of huts belonging to low-income workers lay in ashes. The government hastily set up temporary camps for the homeless and rushed in emergency food supplies. By week's end Major General Laxman Rawat, the army commander for western India, declared the situation under control, but assured nervous citizens that the troops would remain as long as necessary.

The violence began in Bhiwandi (pop. 300,000, two-thirds Muslim), a textile town 32 miles northeast of Bombay with a history of Hindu-Muslim enmity: bitter fighting between Hindu and Muslim extremists in 1970 left 150 people dead. Tensions began to rise again in Bhiwandi and other Maharashtra towns earlier this year. One specific incident came in late April when Bal Thackeray, leader of a militant, right-wing Hindu organization called Shiv Sena, gave a speech in which he reportedly maligned the Islamic faith. Muslims retaliated by garlanding a portrait of Thackeray with dirty sandals, an insult to Hindus. Next, roving gangs of Shiv Sena members armed with gasoline bombs, daggers, spears and a few guns ordered shops to close and observe a general strike. Muslims in Bhiwandi brought out the green flags of Islam, and the battle lines were drawn.

Within hours, stones and bottles began to fly, and the rioting quickly escalated into burning and killing. In Bhiwandi, some 50 Muslim workers and their families sought refuge at the textile factory and home of Ibrahim Ansari, 50, a prosperous Muslim industrialist. A Hindu mob brandishing knives, fire bombs and cans of kerosene descended on the compound. From their barricaded living room, Ansari and his son managed to hold off the attackers with a revolver and a shotgun until police finally arrived. But by that time 20 people had been massacred.

"Here is where they killed one man," said Ansari afterward, pointing to a pile of ashes, a charred shirt, a sandal and a puddle of blood. "They stabbed him in the stomach with a sword and poured kerosene on him and set him on fire while he was still alive." The violence quickly spread to Bhiwandi's slum areas, where Hindus and Muslims live uncomfortably side by side: an estimated 15,000 huts were put to the torch. Soon the rioting spilled over to other industrial towns in the region and to Bombay itself.

Much of the violence was random. Some of the rioters were known troublemakers; others were youths who have flocked into the city in recent years in an unsuccessful search for work. After the army had finally restored a semblance of order, new clashes broke out during a by-election in Hyderabad, some 400 miles east of Bombay. Six people were killed and 250 arrested.

The animosity that persists between India's 500 million Hindus and 80 million Muslims has been centuries in the making. Though generally suppressed during 200 years of British rule, it surfaced to divide the subcontinent in 1947. British India was divided into two sovereign states, India and Pakistan. A massive exchange of 12 million people followed, with most Hindus opting for India, many Muslims for Pakistan. Partition unleashed an orgy of religious bloodletting in which an estimated 500,000 people died.

Deep scars remain. More than 3,000 people died last year when a wave of killing surged over the northeastern state of Assam. Last week Sikh gunmen killed 35 people, many of them Hindus, in separate incidents, bringing to more than 200 the number of victims in the northwestern state of Punjab over the past four months. Government officials are concerned because such violence is on the rise. Said a senior civil servant in New Delhi last week: "Communal clashes are almost becoming a form of alternate government in our country, and what makes it worse is that they strike at the heart of true democracy. "

--By Marguerite Johnson.Reported by Dean Brelis/New Delhi

With reporting by Dean Brelis