AHMEDABAD // Twelve years after being displaced by religious riots, residents of a small Muslim settlement outside Gujarat’s largest city say they have received no help at all from the state government to rebuild their lives.

The people of Citizen Nagar, more than a dozen kilometres from the heart of Ahmedabad, were resettled there after losing their homes and possessions, and in some cases family members, during the 2002 riots in which more than 1,000 Muslims were killed.

Authorities in the state, headed by Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party since 2001, provided the settlement with electricity only in 2005 – three years after it was built. It has yet to receive piped water.

Like the other houses in Citizen Nagar, Reshmaben Saiyed’s home, with its asbestos-sheet roof and lime-green walls, was built with funding from Islamic charities and the central government.

Ms Saiyed says Mr Modi’s government provided no assistance at all, and, now that he is the leading contender to become the next prime minister after the ongoing general election, she voices a concern of Muslims across the country.

“If Narendra Modi did so much damage to us as chief minister, imagine what he can do sitting as prime minister in New Delhi,” said Ms Saiyed, whose family fled from the burning town of Naroda Patiya in 2002.

Mr Modi’s critics claim he is deeply anti-Muslim, pointing to several of his speeches in the past decade as well as to the riots, the biggest stain on his record. While a Supreme Court investigation cleared Mr Modi any crimes, he has been accused of failing to stop the right-wing Hindu mobs that killed Muslims and torched thousands of Muslim homes and shops across the state.

“It has been 12 years, and there has been no resolution,” Ms Saiyed said. “We received no compensation from the Gujarat government. Just a handful of the culprits have been punished.”

But tensions in Gujarat between Hindus and Muslims, who make up 90 and 9 per cent of the state’s population respectively, existed long before Mr Modi’s advent on the political scene. Communal riots have flared in various parts of the state since the 1960s.

Even today, Muslims in Ahmedabad find it difficult to rent flats in Hindu-dominated areas of the city, leading to what some Muslims residents call “ghettoisation”.

“There isn’t a single mixed building in the city,” said Nadeem Jaffri, a Muslim resident of Ahmedabad.

But the tensions between the two communities were “exacerbated after he came to power, and after the riots”, said Zahir Janmohamed, a Muslim former human-rights activist who moved to Ahmedabad from America three years ago to write a book about the aftermath of the 2002 riots.

Mr Janmohamed lives in Juhapura, a neighbourhood of Ahmedabad that was established by the government in 1973 to house people displaced by the flooding of the Sabarmati river that year. Over time, Juhapura also received Muslims displaced by riots in 1980, 1985, 1990, 1992 and 2002, and now the district is almost entirely Muslim – mostly because, as Mr Jaffri pointed out, Muslims find it impossible to get an apartment in Hindu-dominated parts of the city.

“There’s a stigma to living in Juhapura,” Mr Janmohamed said. “When I went to open a bank account, for example, I could see how the teller’s face just fell when I gave my address.” The stigma of living in Juhapura, he suggested, was tied to the stigma of just being a Muslim in Gujarat.

Juhapura is not quite as neglected as Citizen Nagar, but its 500,000 residents still lack proper facilities. The sewerage system is inadequate, and many of its inner roads are never repaired. The first municipal school was opened only last year.

Mr Jaffri, who owns a grocery store in Juhapura, hesitated to call the neglect deliberate.

“But it’s clear that we aren’t high on the list of priorities of the government.”

Mr Jaffri chose his words carefully. Mr Modi has been projecting himself as a leader who excels at economic development, and Mr Jaffri acknowledged the improvements in the state’s infrastructure over the past decade, during which the road system has improved, power supply has become stable and shipping ports have expanded their capacity.

“We have to give him some credit for that,” Mr Jaffri said. “But when he talks about development, it should reach areas like Juhapura also.

“And we can’t forget that the Gujarati spirit is also responsible, in large part, for the development,” he said, referring to the entrepreneurship for which residents of the state are known.

Mr Jaffri’s predictions for India under Mr Modi are not quite as bleak as Ms Saiyed’s.

“In Gujarat, Modi has been like a king. He had absolute control over the state,” he said. “But at the national level, he won’t have such a strong influence. There will be other parties in his coalition. There will be state governments run by other parties.”

But, Mr Jaffri said, “I still can’t trust him. Our trust was shaken so much in 2002, and you can’t rebuild that”.

He also sees another problem.

“If he wins the election, it will stamp a right-wing presence in India – that’s not a good thing at all for the country.”

ssubramanian@thenational.ae