That it took India several months to fathom the depths of anti-Muslim bestiality in Bhagalpur tells something important about its attitude towards the country’s largest religious minority.
Although some estimates put the death toll in Bhagalpur and 150 adjoining villages at 1,500, an accurate figure may never be known. Because of police complicity and official coverup in the massacre, many mass graves may never be “discovered” and bodies from ponds and wells never pulled out. Indeed, the ones that were dumped in the River Ganges can never be redeemed. One report has it that the local police poured chemicals in a well, which contained bodies of the victims, to expedite decomposition.
The more than 10,000 Muslim refugees who have lived to tell their harrowing tales have once again found that getting justice in India is next to impossible. The thriving Bhagalpur Muslim community that once was, has been reduced to gutted houses, mosques, and shops. The living has not only to mourn their dead, but also to find a haven where they can nurse their psychological wounds and build their lives far from the reach of vicious Hindus. Whether they can find such a refuge in India, their ancestral land, is a matter of open debate.
The immediate cause of the Bhagalpur massacre was Hindu provocation and efforts to bait Muslims into the Babari Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi controversy in Ayodhya. That dispute is far from settled and may erupt into a civil war if New Delhi continues to pander to the fanatic Hindus. In Bhagalpur, the murderers not only violated Muslim lives and properties but also the Indian Constitution, which guarantees basic freedoms to all citizens.
Bhagalpur cries for justice. But justice requires more than cosmetic changes and official statements. The new government in New Delhi, which is strongly represented by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has to rise above party politics to deliver what it must. It is an ironic parallel that Prime Minister V.P. Singh and his predecessor, Rajiv Gandhi, came to power in the wake of the butchering of a minority: Muslims in Mr. Singh’s case, and Sikhs in Mr. Gandhi’s.
