Mass Burial For Muslims In India

There were no relatives to mourn over the charred body of the girl, perhaps six months old, who once wore an orange dress.

Instead, Muslim volunteers, fighting back tears, wrapped a white sheet around her broken body and buried her. They also buried the pregnant woman, the handicapped boy and 183 other unclaimed bodies in a mass Islamic funeral in this western Indian town.

In a final gesture of lament, the workers placed a white lotus on the shrouds, each one a statistic in last week's Hindu-Muslim riots, the worst religious violence in India in a decade.

Four Muslim priests recited verses from the Quran that they held in one hand.

"Allah give peace to all. We need your blessings. Keep us well as is your will," chanted the volunteers as they lowered the bodies into the freshly dug graves.

At least 602 people were killed since Wednesday when a Muslim mob set fire to a train carrying Hindu activists. In retaliation, Hindu mobs went on the rampage, trapping Muslim families in their homes, cars and workshops and setting them on fire.

Rescue workers have been pulling out the charred bodies out of the gutted buildings but surviving relatives, who fled the carnage, have been too scared to come out to claim the bodies or to travel to the burial ground. In many cases, entire families were wiped out.

Before the burial, the volunteers laid out a few personal belongings of the victims -- a burned orange dress that the infant once wore, a pair of crutches that the boy had used.

"These bodies were not claimed from the morgue as not a single member of these families survived. We have to do all the last rites as if they were our father, mother or daughter," said Siddqui Mullah, a social worker.

The sweet smell of burning incense and attar, an oil extracted from flower petals, filled the burial ground. The volunteers purchased loads of lotus flowers to complete the ceremony. Although not a religious requirement, some Islamic communities place flowers on bodies during burial, and white symbolizes purity in Islam.

Many Muslims, while aghast at the Hindu savagery, have also condemned the train massacre of the Hindus.

"The people who killed the train passengers were not human beings and cannot belong to any community, any religion or any group," said Ataullah Khan, a volunteer who runs a successful transport business in Ahmadabad.

"But the people who caused hundreds of deaths in this city are also not human beings. There is no need for revenge."

The volunteers were upset that the Gujarat state government of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, had done nothing to help.

"We do not need their (government's) sympathy or money but at least some representative could have been here to ask whether we needed assistance in such a huge task," said Mullah, the social worker.