But when these mobs came, no one rose forward to stop them,” he said. “Everyone in the village respected our ancestor who died so that the rest could live in peace. That is the help they gave us,” he told Al Jazeera. “They simply told us to leave before they burned us too. “They were yelling ‘miyaan nu maaro, anay kaato’ along with slogans such as ‘Jai Shri Ram’ ,” he told Al Jazeera, using the Gujarati and Hindi words.Īs Gul saw his home with all its memories and earnings turn to ashes, he rushed to the erstwhile ruling Thakurs for help. He said he still shivers at the memory of the day when he narrowly managed to escape death while his home was torched. Gul Mohammed Yar Mohammed Makrani, 63, is the fifth-generation descendant of Shah Beg Makrani. One of the houses belonging to a Muslim attacked during the 2002 pogrom in Mudeti Two days later, they started to enter the homes of Muslims and threatened to put them on fire – with or without inhabitants inside. The mob then began attacking shops and businesses owned by Muslims. In the village of about 800 homes, trucks loaded with Hindu rioters appeared on the night of March 1, 2002. The burning of the train at Godhra was followed by the worst religious violence in independent India’s history, in which nearly 2,000 people were killed, hundreds of women raped and thousands of homes and mosques destroyed across Gujarat, one of India’s wealthiest states. Hindu right-wing groups say the mosque stood at the site of Ram’s birthplace, a claim that has also been endorsed by India’s Supreme Court which in 2019 handed over the disputed site to the groups affiliated to Modi’s party, who are now constructing the temple in Ayodhya. The state government, then headed by current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said a majority of the dead were karsevak (volunteers) who had gone to Ayodhya to campaign for the construction of a temple dedicated to Hindu God Ram at the exact site where a Mughal-era mosque was demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992.
On February 27, 2002, a train carrying a large number of Hindu pilgrims returning from the northern holy town of Ayodhya stopped at Godhra, a small town in Gujarat’s Panchmahal district, about 150km (93 miles) from the state capital, Gandhinagar.įollowing a reported altercation between the Muslim vendors working at the station and passengers inside the Sabarmati Express, the details of which are still not clear, a fire engulfed one of the coaches of the train, killing 59 people. Leaving village ‘our ancestor once saved’ Reason: a pogrom against Gujarat’s Muslims in 2002. Nearly 165 years later, Makrani’s kin cannot return to the village of their illustrious and celebrated forefathers.
The British saw him as the last man standing in the battle and fired cannonballs at the tower. The shrine of freedom fighter Shah Beg Makrani in Mudeti village Īs the British forces attacked Mudeti to topple its ruler and crush his supporters, Makrani stationed himself on top of a tower from where his arrows took down the British soldiers. And Makrani – who according to legend was a master archer despite having leprosy in the lower part of his body – was its hero.
One such battle was fought in Mudeti, a tiny princely state ruled by a Hindu Thakur family. The many battles fought in 1857 against the colonial forces – often called India’s first war of independence – have become subjects of folklore in the country. In 1857, a rebellion against the British rule spread across the Indian subcontinent, with many mutineers pledging allegiance to either their regional kings or the crumbling Mughal throne. Mudeti (Gujarat), India – Tucked away in a corner of Mudeti, a village 124km (77 miles) from Gujarat state’s main city of Ahmedabad in western India, lies a mazaar (shrine) of Shah Beg Makrani, a Muslim freedom fighter revered in the region.
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