HUDDLED UNDER Ahmedabad’s Chanakyapuri flyover with their bags and small children, they waited for a bus that would take them on a backbreaking 24-30-hour journey home to Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.
From Ahmedabad and its neighbouring districts, Hindi-speaking migrants who have lived in Gujarat for years, are fleeing — driven by fear after mobs, seemingly angry over the alleged rape of a 14-month-old girl, started to attack “non-Gujaratis” earlier this week.
In some cases, landlords had asked them to leave, said some of the migrants waiting for a bus in the afternoon sun Saturday. At least 180 people had been arrested in the districts of Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad, Sabarkantha, Patan, and Mehsana for targeting migrants, especially those from UP and Bihar, police had said Friday.
“My children were playing in the lane outside our house when the mob attacked on Thursday night. They are still in shock. I took my four-year-old son to the doctor to calm him down that night,” said Rajkumari Jatav, 30, waiting for a bus to return to her village in Bhind district of Madhya Pradesh.
Rajkumari’s three children and her husband, who does paint jobs to sustain the family, live in Mahadev Nagar, a colony of migrants in Ahmedabad’s Chandlodiya area. Several other migrant families who are their neighbours, are fleeing too — in their seven years in Gujarat, none of them has ever felt a fear like this, Rajkumari said.
Dharmendra Kushwaha, who too is from Bhind and lives in Mahadev Nagar, said some 1,500 UP, Bihar, and MP migrants may have fled from their homes in the colony over the last few days. “Two hundred people left today,” said Kushwaha, 20, a labourer who works with painters, and arrived in Ahmedabad two years ago after spending seven years in Surat. He said masked men had told him to “leave Gujarat before 9 am” Saturday, or he would be dead.
Some 20 buses, each packed with more than 80 passengers, left for UP, MP and Bihar Saturday. Normally, no more than a handful of buses leave on these long-distance routes every week.
“A bus would leave for UP, Bihar, or MP once in two days, with perhaps 25 passengers. But now, I am having to accommodate 80 or 90 people in each bus. And 20 such buses are leaving every day,” said Pintoo Singh of Satyam Tomar Travels, an agency that has been operating private buses on these routes for several years.
Krishnachandra Sharma, a 42-year-old building construction contractor who says he has lived in Ahmedabad for the last 22 years, cannot recall having witnessed seen a situation earlier. “There have been Hindu-Muslim riots, but never something like this. The news spread like wildfire on Facebook and WhatsApp, which everyone has on their phones,” he said.