by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Hot countries populated by brown people tend to fall off the Western world's radar when something horrific isn't happening. But two years ago, the Indian state of Gujarat blew up in the world's face when rampaging mobs of Hindus slaughtered between 2,000 and 5,000 Muslims in one of the worst outbreaks of sectarian violence in recent Indian history. The most common method of murder was to burn victims alive - after gang-raping them, often with blunt instruments, if the victims were female. Reports of fetuses being ripped from women's wombs and set alight were also not uncommon.

The riots sprang from a Muslim attack on a train carrying Hindu activists who were returning from a campaign to build a Hindu temple on the site of a sixteenth-century mosque that had been destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992 (that incident also sparked a wave of violence across the country, killing thousands). Fifty-eight people, many of them women and children, were killed. The three days that followed, from Feb. 28 to March 2, were blood-soaked. Over 100,000 people were made refugees in their own country.

To commemorate the tragedy, Dolores Chew, a Marianopolis professor of South Asian women's studies and Indian history and politics, will present a film and lecture on Friday, March 5, at Concordia. The Gujarat Genocide Awareness event will examine the campaign of state-sponsored hate and promotion of violence which continues today.

Hate campaign

Chew says the apologists for the massacres - and those who claim it was an unfortunate one-time event - are dead wrong. "I don't see Gujarat as an aberration," she says. "I want to dispel the notion that this isn't India, that things will calm down."

She points out that a sustained campaign of anti-Muslim propaganda has been a cornerstone for various state governments controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). During the riots, Muslims were hunted down according to voters' lists, and police, when not actively participating in the killings, did nothing to stop them. The title of a Human Rights Watch report on the massacres is an actual quote from a Gujarati policeman: "We have no orders to save you."

"There had been a pamphlet that was widely available to everyone, which was similar to what the Nazis did to the German Jews before the war," says Chew. "You know, calls to boycott Muslim businesses, warnings to Hindu girls to beware of handsome Muslim boys because they'll sell them into slavery rings - it was all very nasty... I personally see the massacres as the culmination of a campaign of hatred, carried out in a multiplicity of ways, including changing schoolbooks, distancing the communities from each other, dehumanizing them. So at the end of the day, there are all kinds of reasons, plus state complicity." Intermarried couples - and there were many - were especially targetted by the rioters.

The post-9/11 atmosphere, coupled with attacks by Kashmiri Muslim militants inside India, haven't helped bring the communities together either. "There was a sense that Muslims in India could form a fifth column," she says. "Everything was seen as a conspiracy." The result, Chew says, is an increased ghettoization of Indian Muslims, as they seek safety in others. In areas where civil society was never strong, like Gujarat, this has weakened it even further.

Chew, who was raised a Roman Catholic in Calcutta, doesn't claim to be an expert on Gujarati politics or society, but the reports she heard from the region were so disturbing that she felt she had to visit the area on her trip to India last year. "It was like a pilgrimage, to go see these people" she says. "I wanted to let them know that people were concerned, that people want justice." She mentions the women she met, many horribly disfigured by the burns they received during the riots.

She wants to bring that reality to Montreal, to show people here that what happens halfway across the world does resonate in North America. "I feel committed to telling people here what those women told me," she says. "I want to challenge the bigotry, the racism, the xenophobia that exists in living rooms across the country."

The Gujarat Genocide Awareness Event will take place on Friday, March 5, at Concordia's Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W.), Room H-110, at 7 pm, Free.