Same fight, different voters

Five years after it was brutally snuffed out, life has not been the same at the Gulberg Housing Society in Ahmedabad.

Five years after it was brutally snuffed out, life has not been the same at the Gulberg Housing Society in Ahmedabad. A deathly calm inhabits the 19 bungalows and four flats. All but one of its 250 residents were scared into abandoning it following the 2002 riots, which claimed 69 lives, including that of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri.

Expectedly, nothing is the same here. Surprising then, the BJP and Congress have fielded the same candidates from this constituency—Asarwa—as they did in 2002. BJP’s Pradeepsinh Jadeja will take on the Congress’s Dr Madhuben Patin, whom he had defeated with a huge margin last time. Jadeja is confident of winning the seat again.

All but one of the Society’s survivors who have settled in different parts of the state, mostly in Ahmedabad, have enrolled their names at their new places of residence.The one man who continues to operate out of here is Aslam Mansuri, who uses his house only for business. He has shifted his family to the nearby Muslim-dominated Rakhial. “I run my business during the day and go back to Rakhial at night,” says Mansuri. “One cannot live in a society where all 19 bungalows and four flats are unoccupied,” he said.

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He still has his name on the electoral rolls of the Asarwa constituency. “I exercised my right to vote in the 2004 parliamentary elections and will cast my vote again in Asarwa,” he said. However, his family members have been shifted to the electoral rolls in Rakhial.

Similarly, Jafri’s widow, Zakia, has enrolled herself in Surat where she has been living with her eldest son Tanvir. Her younger son and a daughter are in the US.

The Parsi couple, Dara and Rupa Modi, who lost their son in the riots, have also got their names shifted to Vastrapur.