India: Victims’ fears as massacre perpetrators, including a politician, are jailed

A FORMER Indian state minister has been sentenced to 28 years in jail for murder during one of the country’s worst religious riots, when up to 2,500 people, most of them Muslim, were hunted down and beaten or burnt to death in 2002.

Maya Kodnani, a sitting lawmaker for Gujarat state’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), and 30 others were jailed for their role in the so-called Naroda Patiya massacre, the single bloodiest episode of the three-day riots.

Her conviction is an embarrassment for both the BJP – the country’s main opposition party – and Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi.

When the sentences were announced, a wail erupted from a crowd of women relatives of the convicted gathered outside the courthouse in Ahmedabad, the western state’s main city.

Most relatives of the victims stayed away, a sign that 10 years on, memories of the bloodletting by Hindu mobs still cast a pall of fear.

“We’re not risking our lives by going there. It’ll be like walking into a lion’s mouth,” Nazir Khan, a school teacher in Naroda Patiya, a suburb of Ahmedabad, said.