Mumbai: Leading activists and Muslim leaders though welcome some of the observations made in the report have challenged the Home Ministry statistics on communal violence circulated amongst members of the National Integration Council (NIC) on Monday, terming them rubbish and far from reality.
"I have serious doubts about the accuracy of the official statistics. They did not capture the complete picture", said President of Zakat Foundation, and ex OSD at PMO, Dr Syed Zafar Mahmood.
"The real situation is much worse," he added.
"There are camps after camps of people who have had to flee their homes during the Muzaffarnagar riots. Why are they only full of Muslims," he asked.
Noted Activist and Chairperson of ANHAD Shabnam Hashmi also disputed the government figures, though she welcome the report which has perhaps for the first time disclosed the religious identities of the people affected by the communal riots.
"It is good that the home ministry has come out with a report in which it has chosen to disclose the religious identities of people affected by the riots. But, the figures given in the report are far from true. They are misrepresentation of facts", Shabnam Hashmi, who has been part of fact finding teams sent to the riot-affected areas including Muzaffarnagar, said while talking to ummid.com.
"Barring 1984 anti-Sikh riots, in all the riots that India has seen more than 80% of the victims are Muslims. It is they who died or got injured, and it is they who suffered material losses", she added.
Editor of The Milli Gazette Dr Zafarul Islam Khan, who has an in-depth knowledge of communal violence taking place in the country, termed the report as 'rubbish' which cannot be accepted.
"It is a government report which is never true. For such reports, government relies on data provided by state and police, and police have tendency to hide the actual facts. There are reports when police refused to register FIR. Against this backdrop, how can their report be right?" he asked.
He also said that in Muzaffarnagar alone there is a wide gap between the actual death toll and what is being reported by the government.
"The government has so far confirmed the death of 49 people in the Muzaffarnagar riots. We have with us the names and addresses of 64 people who died in this violence", Dr Khan, who visited Muzaffarnagar tow times after the riots, said.
He also said that the actual death toll in Muzaffarnagar is still higher as there are dead bodies that were either burnt, completely destroyed or buried at undisclosed locations.
A document released by the Home Ministry said there were 479 riots in the country, including in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, till September 15 in which 107 people lost their lives. It also said that of the total 107 people who lost their lives in riots this year, 66 were Muslims and 41 were Hindus.
The report said, in Gujarat, there were 54 cases of communal violence and 21 of tension in 2013 in which six people lost their lives of whom three each were Hindus and Muslims. Of the injured in Gujarat, 85 were Hindus, 57 Muslims and five were police personnel.
The statistics circulated amongst members of the National Integration Council indicates that the administrative machinery often does not respond effectively when minorities are targeted.
In UP, 20 members of the majority community were killed against 42 minorities in 92 incidents till 15 September this year. Minorities, similarly, account for a larger number proportion of the injured too.
Nationwide, 107 people were killed in communal incidents this year including 66 minority community members.
This was true of Congress-ruled Maharashtra too where 10 people lost their lives and 271 were injured in 56 incidents of communal violence. Seven of the 10 were from the minority community.
The home ministry compiles the data on the basis of reports from the state governments.
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