New Delhi: “Very little” has been done to settle riot-affected people of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts of Uttar Pradesh, who continue to live in inhuman conditions even after three years of the unrest, NGO Aman Biradari said on Tuesday.
The riot-affected people, who had lost everything during the unrest in September 2013, have settled in self-established colonies which lack all basic amenities, said a release by the NGO.
Iqbal Zafar, a researcher working with Aman Biradari which is also defined as people’s campaign for a secular, peaceful, just and humane world, told that they have surveyed 65 such colonies and found out that a “very little” has been done to support the affected families, and similarly nothing much has been done to ensure justice to them.
“They live in inhuman conditions. It’s a bad situation,” he said, adding that there is not even any public record of these new colonies.
The clashes between the Hindu and Muslim communities in Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh which took place in August–September 2013, resulted in many deaths, injured and more than 50,000 displaced.
The riot has been described as “the worst violence in Uttar Pradesh in recent history”. Supreme Court of India while hearing petitions in relation to the riots held the Akhilesh Yadav led Samajwadi Party, prima facie guilty of negligence in preventing the violence and ordered it to immediately arrest all those accused irrespective of their political affiliation. Court also blamed the Central government for its failure to provide intelligence inputs to the Samajwadi Party-ruled state government in time to help sound alerts.
It is to be noted that three years after the communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, not a single person has been convicted in any of the 511 cases probed by the special investigating team (SIT) constituted by the state government.
A book “Living Apart: Communal Violence and Forced Displacement in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli”, dealing with the incident and the experiences of the affected, is to be released on September 7 and 8 in Lucknow and Delhi respectively.