Word: mobbing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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 to break it down, imitating the 1992 episode at Ayodhya. Not a policeman could be seen. One rioter said with pride, "We did this ourselves." Another man boasted that he had killed nine Muslims. "I was acting for all Hindus," he said...
Elsewhere in Ahmadabad, Congress Party politician Ahsan Jafri gave shelter to fellow Muslims in his home, part of a 16-house Muslim colony. When the mob came, Jafri fired his revolver, injuring a few attackers. Furious, the crowd tore into the colony, dragging out the residents and setting them ablaze. Jafri and his family died. In the Hindu mob was a schoolboy, Roshan, 12. From a safe distance, he claimed, he saw Jafri's daughters being stripped and raped. He sounded frightened but admiring. When he grew up, would he do that? "Maybe not rape," he said thoughtfully...
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 they came back with a vengeance. Just as each marauding mob in Gujarat had leadership, almost always a local pol, their inspiration (if not their directives) come right down from people within the party now ruling India. The big question: Which train is Vajpayee pulling? That of a modern India trying to get away from its blood-drenched past - or one heading off in a new and different direction...