Ram Singh: Shelter from the Storm

By Aaron Glantz

The scars of last spring’s riots are still fresh in Demai, a small town off a main highway in Gujarat. Like the rest of Gujarat, rioting Hindu mobs torched most Muslim-owned homes, businesses, and places of worship--all with the help of the police and the state government. But here in Demai, the story was a bit different. Unlike most other cities and towns throughout Gujarat, no Muslims were killed.

“We were huddled in there,” a 14-year-old boy says, pointing at a third-floor window over a burnt-out storefront. The metals repair shop in the building was blown up by a kerosene bomb, he says. Only a few bricks and the strongest steel remain. “There were 12 of us up there in one room,” the boy continues, “and we climbed out the window using a rope. We hid in the fields at night; and in the morning, we fled to Bapu’s farm.”

Bapu is a term of respect in India; literally translated, it means “grandfather.” It’s the word many Indians use to describe Mahatma Ghandi. In this case, it refers to a Hindu farmer named Ram Singh, who sheltered more than 500 Muslims in his three-story farmhouse during the worst of the riots.

Singh is 70 years old. He has kind brown eyes and a head of mangy white hair that stands as a tuft on his head. His family has been farming the same 200 acres in central Gujarat for more than 1,500 years. “Communal tensions have always come and gone,” he says, sipping a cup of chai tea, “and whenever they’ve come, people have always known my house is one place that would be unaffected by the violence.”

His standing in the community keeps the mobs at bay. For more than a decade, Ram Singh served in the Gujarat State Assembly and the Indian Parliament--sometimes as a member of the secular Congress Party, sometimes as an independent. “I feel absolutely secure,” he says.

At the height of the riots, Ram Singh turned back an armed mob of thousands armed only with his walking stick and a jeep. His face lights up as he tells the story:

Some people came rushing to me and told me that outside a nearby village there were thousands of people gathering, and they were arming themselves with all kinds of weapons to attack the Muslims. So I got a jeep and four or five other people with sticks. ... When I reached there, I found 6,000 to 7,000 people. I tried to negotiate with them. ... But they did not listen, so there was no other option but to run the jeep right into the crowd. And that worked. There was no more rioting in that village that day. And many of the families from that village fled to my house, and I gave them food and shelter.

Then Bapu’s face turns sad. The police should have stopped the mob, he says. What makes him angriest, he says, is that Demai is one of the places in Gujarat controlled by the Congress Party, not the right-wing BJP. But when 1,500 Muslims went to the local head of the Congress Party because they were about to be attacked, Singh says, “he not only shut his gates, but he left them to be attacked by the gathering crowds. Political opportunism led people not to come out to protect the helpless people who happened to be Muslims. It is just a question of votes. Because there are many more Hindus than Muslims in Gujarat.”