Word: godhra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...latest troubles began when a group of Hindu pilgrims returning by train from Ayodhya, where they had gone to participate in rituals they hoped were a prelude to building a temple on the disputed site, passed through Godhra. Suddenly, someone pulled the emergency brake. The train halted in a mostly Muslim neighborhood, where a mob was waiting with stones, knives and gasoline. The horde burned down coaches occupied by pilgrims and murdered any it could catch. Most of the 58 victims were women and children, unable to outrun their predators...
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...
...Last week, almost 56 years later, it happened again. A train ferrying a group of Hindu pilgrims from the temple town of Ayodhya in central India pulled into the western town of Godhra shortly after dawn, where a group of local Muslims was waiting. As the engine gathered speed leaving Godhra, someone pulled the emergency brake chain and attackers stormed the passenger cars. They hurled bottles filled with gasoline, setting coaches aflame. Able-bodied men managed to escape the conflagration; 40 of the 58 deaths were of women and children charred on board...
...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...
...mobs has been a constant headache for the Prime Minister. His ability to keep contradictions under control was strained with the call given by sadhus and zealots to start construction of a temple at the disputed site this month; it snapped when Muslim fanatics attacked a train in Godhra, Gujarat, and killed Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. In its first test of lynch-mob politics, the government of Vajpayee in New Delhi failed, while the BJP administration in Gujarat could barely conceal its support for those mobs. Paradoxically, Muslim fundamentalists, like the hectoring, acid-tongued Syed Shahabuddin, created a platform...