Twelve-year-old Bilal watched in horror as his mother and elder brother were beaten to death and thrown into a burning truck. It was the same lorry in which moments earlier they were fleeing from rampaging mobs in Kalol village of Gujarat's Panchmahals district.

Fourteen-year-old Javed will never forget the horrendous sight of a mob slitting open the stomach of his pregnant cousin Kausar Bano, killing the mother and her unborn child, in the Naroda-Patiya neighbourhood of Ahmedabad. Eleven-year-old Shamshun Nisha saw three people being burnt alive even as she huddled with her family on the roof of their apartment block in Dani Limda area of Ahmedabad.

Eleven-year-old Tehzeem Bano will never understand why even women wielded swords during the carnage. Bilal, Javed, Shamshun and Tehnzeem were among about a dozen children who displayed remarkable equanimity today as they relived the horrors of the sectarian violence that swept Gujarat since February-end, leaving about 950 persons dead.

The children were in Delhi for a national seminar on the impact of communal and political violence on children organised by NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA or Save Childhood Movement).

"Throughout history it is the adults who have created the problems and it is the children who have had to suffer the most," lamented Ashgar ali Engineer, a prominent rights activist who belongs to the Bohra Muslim Community.

"Be it the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, the riots in Mumbai following the demolition of Ayodhya's Babri mosque in 1992, the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir or the Gujarat violence of 2002, it is children who have to bear the maximum burden," BBA Chairperson Kailash Satyarthi said."We call ourselves a secular democratic republic, but what have we done to translate this into reality?" asked an anguished Engineer. "Communalism has become a self-supporting industry" for politicians and that was perhaps why no political party was prepared to take concrete steps to stamp out sectarian strife, Engineer contended.

"Why should children's rights be seen in isolation?" he wondered, holding that children would continue to suffer till such time society addressed the deeper malaise. Satyarthi deprecated the knee-jerk reaction of society and the media that amounted to no more than lip service to the rights of children.

"Children are counted as numbers, completely ignoring the fact that these children also have faces and a soul which might have been shattered. We also tend to forget that these children have a future. They will live with the feeling of hatred, fear and revenge all their lives," Satyarati said.

The urge for revenge might pass, said child psychiatrist Jitendra Nagpal, but the scars suffered by children who lived through communal strife would never heal. " Children have a photographic memory and it is difficult to remove from their minds the images of violence they witness," said Nagpal, referring to what in medical terms is referred to a post-traumatic stress disorder.

Such children display signs of fear, helplessness and low self-esteem," and it becomes difficult to reach out to them, particularly if are aged below 12," Nagpal said.

Medical experts point out that the Gujarat violence has created two categories of children - the violence-displaced in the relief camps and those who continue to live in their own homes. No reliable estimate is available of the number  of children affected by the Gujarat carnage, but the figure is likely to run into tens of hundreds, experts say. The seminar urged that the rehabilitation process in gujarat should focus on the psychological impact on children, both in the short and the long term.
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SOURCE: `Deccan Herald' Newspaper dt.25th May 2002