'Just' the Gujarat Riots.
When disasters happen, we find solace behind the numbers. Numbers assuage the pain and help us to trivialise the suffering of others.
while even the death of one loved person is unbearable to many of us, we rarely get into the trouble of trying to fathom the demise of one hundred loving people from our lives.
I am led to believe that we human beings are not hardwired to feel the pain of another individual. But may be, trying to look at them one at a time will help us fathom the gravity of the issue in hand.
This is just an attempt in that direction. All riots are equally terrible and unfortunate. The reason to pick Gujarat riot for this article is that a friend of mine mentioned casually about it to me, which I regard as an instance of violence.
Trivialising the suffering of another individual equates to violence. I hope this article takes you one step towards a resolution on not to trivialise violence.
All the human beings who lost their lives in the 2002 Gujarat Riots.
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If your eyes see the religion before the Human dead, you can have it here.
Muslims who lost their lives.
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Hindus who lost their lives.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The people who went missing.
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People who lost their lives in the Godhra Carnage.
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Children
* * * * * * * * * *
Women
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Men
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People who lost their lives in the Naroda Patiya Massacre .
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Children
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Women
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Men
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** These are according to the official reports. Some unofficial, but believable reports estimates the death tolls as high as three times the official reports.
Whenever I mention the Gujarat Riots to my right wing friends, many of them snap back with the 1984 riots.
Riots, no matter where they occurred or what kind of people died in it, are always terrible. Sometimes we are urged to look over them and convince ourselves that the riots were inevitable, no one is to blame.
We tell to ourselves that the leaders whom we ‘worship’ are not responsible for them. We conveniently forget that unable to prevent them equates to connivance.
We don’t mind being oblivious to the political conspiracy and instigation that converts ordinary human beings into ‘killing machines’. I am not going there.
This is not a political statement. This is not meant to be acerbic. This is just a living human being looking at the human beings dead.
All the dots here correspond to aa human being who lost his life. A human being like you and me, A human being who loved and was loved, A human being with a lot of dreams and aspirations.
He is just a dot in my blog post now. You are free to use the word ‘just’ when you refer to Gujarat riots. Their lives doesn’t matter, because they died for the wrong cause at the wrong place in the wrong time.