A new book finds that poor Muslims in Godhra are still ghettoised even 20 years after the riots

In Godhra, if you like to eat good non-vegetarian food, Polan Bazar near the railway station is your destination. While there are one or two restaurants in other parts of the town serving non-vegetarian food too, good and authentic non-vegetarian food is available only at the restaurants in the Polan Bazar area, where most of the lower-income group Muslims work and live.

With my craving for meat reaching a crescendo after just a few weeks in Gujarat, I took an auto rickshaw to Polan Bazar later that afternoon. Unlike at Lal Baug, kurta-pajama-skull caps are the most preferred attire among men in and around the Polan Bazar area. Like the rest of Godhra, the bazar was noisy, dusty and full of cheerful people going about their day as usual. At the central junction of the bazar, a giant, magnificent Indian tricolour waved atop a tall flagpole of about 50 feet or so.

With long, flowing beards making a resurgence as the in-thing in men’s fashion globally, hair stylists could take a trip down to Polan Bazar to draw inspiration on innovative shapes and colours for facial hair, as beards of almost every possible size, density and shade were sported there. I spotted thick, well-groomed, flowing black beards that could be used to advertise hair oils, trimmed salt-and-pepper beards shaped like an ice cream cone, free-flowing silver-white beards that almost brushed the huge paunches of older men, thin, barely visible noodle-string beards, even brownish-grey henna-dyed goatee beards and adolescent facial hair that was just sprouting off the smooth faces of young boys. Finding a man without a beard would be a challenge out in this bazar.

A few women were also around, dressed in black or brown burkhas, busily arguing with vegetable cart vendors and other roadside shop owners. At the restaurant where I had butter naan and kadhai chicken, just about one or two men wore trousers and shirts/T-shirts like me.

After relishing my first meat dish in weeks, I approached a few business owners in the bazar to talk to them about their town, but most of them shooed me away, claiming they were either too busy or not interested in speaking to media people. Considering that the 20th anniversary of the Godhra train burning was just two days away and one of the prime accused in the case, who had been absconding all these years, was arrested from Signal Falia just about a week before my visit, their reluctance was understandable.

I kept walking in and out of every shop in that stretch, trying to strike up a conversation with someone, when a young man running a travel agency told me to my face that no media, including social media, was allowed in Polan Bazar. He even warned his friend, a hotelier who was present with him and seemed more friendly, to stay away from me. But the hotelier asked me to go and meet a maulana, who was also the principal of the Polan Bazar Urdu School, located at the central junction of the bazar, where the national flag fluttered in the breeze from atop a giant pole. He also offered to call the maulana and put in a word.

The Polan Bazar Urdu School functioned out of a robust concrete multi-storey building on a moderate-sized campus. A middle school with classes up to eight, it accommodated about 500 students, both girls and boys. As I entered, about 100 children from the lower primary classes, seated on a long, cemented corridor of the ground floor, recited the days of the week in English, Urdu and Gujarati one after another. While all the boys were clothed in their traditional kurta-pajamas, the little girls wore colourful dresses with headscarves.

Maulana Iqbal Hussain Bokda was just forty-nine but already an accomplished scholar and a respected man in the community. Besides working as the principal of the school, he was pursuing his PhD in history at Shri Govind Guru University in Godhra and had also earned the title of Maulana for his accomplishments in Islamic studies. Bokda was also the author of two books on the contribution of Muslims to Gujarat and on the role of Muslims in the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. Both books have been published in Gujarati and Urdu. Unlike other community leaders I had approached, the maulana readily agreed to talk to me.

Against the backdrop of the tiny tots reciting Urdu rhymes and numerals sonorously after their teacher as if they were musical notes, the maulana and I chatted for almost half an hour, touching upon various aspects of Muslim life in Godhra, specifically in the Polan Bazar area, which was “100 per cent Muslim and being ghettoised”, according to him.

In our discussion, we touched upon many topics, but the one aspect of my observations that I wanted more clarity on was the scenes I had witnessed at Lal Baug: The clear separation between Muslims and non-Muslims in every aspect, including the games children played. Coming from Chennai, I had never noticed such stark discrimination, although there are predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods in my hometown too. Both adults and children mingle freely and often there; one cannot even find any distinction between members of the two communities until names are called out. But in Godhra, and in the rest of Gujarat too, the situation was very different, and I wanted the maulana’s take on it.

“Muslims here continue to remain poor and uneducated, and that is the core of the problem,” he said, and went on to add that despite the presence of quite a few Urdu schools in and around the city, just about 1 per cent of the Muslim population are postgraduates and hardly 4 to 5 per cent are graduates even in 2022. Girls from Muslim neighbourhoods hardly continue their education beyond class eight and are often married off even before they turn eighteen.

With most Muslim parents admitting their children only to Urdu-medium schools, inter-religious mixing among children remains a pipe dream. Hindus and students from other religions mostly study at schools in Hindu neighbourhoods. As a result, the segregation among children happens at a very early age in Gujarat and, according to the maulana, the scenes I had witnessed at Lal Baug were an outcome of that exclusion.

Since most Muslim students study only in Urdu-medium schools and there is a shortage of Urdu-medium colleges and higher education centres, as opposed to Gujarati- or English-medium institutions, the Muslim youth hardly has any scope for pursuing quality higher education. So they are forced to discontinue studies and take up the family business, often at a very young age, according to the maulana. And for those few scholars who continue higher education in Urdu and Gujarati, such as himself, job opportunities are very few in the rapidly evolving and globalized economy. They are then forced to look for opportunities only within the community, which isolates them even more.

I realised that these problems were quite clear to community leaders like the maulana, but how would they address them? Besides, this is not an issue with the entire Muslim community, for there are affluent Muslim neighbourhoods in Godhra and its surrounding areas, where children go to private schools, adults either run large businesses in swank complexes or leave for jobs in Mumbai, Surat and other big cities, and they do not exist as isolated communities.

It is the poor Muslims who are often at the receiving end of this social exclusion. The core of the issue is the lack of economic growth in the community that forces adults to continue familial occupations and children to study in religious or free community schools, as the maulana pointed out. To me, the lack of economic growth and lack of a solid political space go hand in hand. I had discussed this with other Muslim leaders like Wazir Khan in Juhapura too: Why don’t the Muslims in this region consolidate their vote bank and get their demands fulfilled?

Despite having a sizeable population of over 50 per cent of the 1,62,000 population in Godhra, Muslims have not been able to consolidate the community votes and produce a leader to take up their cause in a democratic space that is theirs. When I asked the maulana about it, he said, “The Muslim community here has not paid attention to it until now. The problem is that nobody has really thought of it yet, and that is mainly due to a lack of education. We have still not understood how to use our vote bank.”

While a vast majority of Muslims, especially from Godhra, have no grasp over any language other than Gujarati or Urdu, which is a major deterrent in taking their cause forward, those like the maulana, who have received a good education and have sound political awareness, have also not come forward. When I asked him about it, he said that it requires a lot of effort to take steps in that direction. “It is a problem, a vast problem.”

Before the maulana could elaborate on his response, the 1 pm muezzin’s call for prayers blared from the loudspeakers of the mosque on the other side of the market junction and the schoolchildren immediately began reciting out loud religious hymns in Urdu. As he prepared to leave for his afternoon prayers, I asked him if he or the other residents of Polan Bazar regretted not having left for Pakistan during Partition, like many of their neighbours or relatives had.

A little disturbed by the question, the principal walked me to the corridor and pointed at the tricolour flying high. “You see that tiranga? Since 2005 that flag has been hoisted every day at 7 am and is brought down at 5 pm. You tell me if you can find this anywhere else in India. The tiranga hoisted every single day! If one person cannot do it, someone else does, but the tiranga is hoisted every day. You know why? It is because we are Indians and we believe in this country,” he asserted as we walked out of the school.

After he left for his prayers, I waited under the awning of a tyre puncture repair shop outside the school for my auto-rickshaw driver, Mehboob, who had also gone to the same mosque for his afternoon prayers. Ahead of me, dozens and dozens of men and boys of different ages came out of the mosque one after another and headed towards their homes and workplaces. As they walked past me, most of them stared at me, and some even spoke among themselves while looking at me.

Standing there, I recalled how unusual and out of place I had found those boys clad in kurta-pajama-skull caps playing chappal-cricket in that lush green park. Here at the busy Polan Bazar junction, I was the odd one out, dressed in a maroon cotton T-shirt and jeans, sporting a sleeveless fishing jacket on top of it. It was clear that my presence was making at least a few people curious and concerned.

And that is probably our biggest failure as a nation. Hindus and Muslims have been coexisting in this country for so many centuries, and yet, at that very moment, I felt like I was in a different world – a world that made me uncomfortable. That is probably also how the Muslims in Godhra feel when they go to Hindu-dominated areas. Perhaps the fact that we still exist in different worlds, so oblivious to the presence of the other, is at the core of the problem that Gandhi spoke about a hundred years ago. Or it could just be a problem of perception and our inability to see the world the way others do.

Excerpted with permission from In Pursuit of Freedom: Travels across Patriotic Lands, Pradeep Damodaran, HarperCollins India.