Word: afsana
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...Afsana's family were among the estimated 400 people who perished last week in vicious ethnic mayhem in India's western Gujarat state. The worst such outbreak since 1993, the killings tested anew the fragile relations between India's 830 million Hindus and 150 million Muslims, and underscored the challenge Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee faces trying to settle their volcanic disputes. At the heart of last week's bloodshed was the northern city of Ayodhya, where in 1992 Hindu militants destroyed a 400-year-old mosque built on the site they believe to be the birthplace of the Hindu...
...killings were shocking enough, but rumors quickly emerged that aggravated the situation--of Hindu women raped on the platform, of girl survivors being carried away. Local leaders of the chauvinistic Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the group planning to rebuild the Ram temple, gave instructions to destroy all Muslims. In Afsana's neighborhood, Naroda, a crowd of 2,000 armed themselves with sticks, stones and bottles of gasoline and went hunting. At least 65 people were killed, their remains left outside their burned homes. After all the Muslims had died or fled, a Hindu mob surrounded the local mosque and started...
Prime Minister Vajpayee has since announced that in the future pilgrims will be stopped from reaching Ayodhya and workers banned from erecting a new temple there. Hindu extremists vowed that they were undeterred. In Ahmadabad, 1,300 Indian soldiers patrolled uneasy streets. The Muslim girl Afsana awoke in a hospital, with burns so severe she could not lie on her back. "Where will I go now?" she asked. "I had such a big family, and all of them are dead. I just wish I had someone to live...
...When Afsana, an 18-year-old Muslim living on the outskirts of the Gujarati capital of Ahmadabad, heard last Wednesday that a Muslim mob had torched a train, the Sabarmati Express, at Godhra, she was appalled - and very, very frightened. She knew that revenge would be nigh. Her neighborhood, Naroda, is largely Hindu. On the day after the Godhra killings, local Hindu leaders gathered a crowd of 2,000 residents and gave them simple instructions: Muslims had to be destroyed. When part of the mob reached Afsana's house, she fled with her five-year-old brother to a Hindu...
...following days, it was the Hindus' turn. Mobs fanned out through Muslim neighborhoods like Afsana's in the western state of Gujarat, led by local politicians and their rabble-rousers - as the Muslims had been at Godhra, according to the police, who charged four local councillors, of whom two were arrested. Their blood lust was fanned by exactly the kind of rumors that fueled the slaughters in 1947: Muslims had abducted teenage girls, or slaughtered cows, which are worshipped by Hindus. The mobs burned families in their houses, demolished mosques, raped wives and daughters. Community police insist they were powerless...