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A team comprising 13 persons from different organizations across the country, convened by the Centre for Peace Studies, visited riot affected survivors from 8-10th of October 2013. The delegation was supported by Action Aid. Prior to the visit the team had studied other fact-finding reports by CPA, Anhad and the preliminary report by Action Aid Lucknow.

The objectives of this team’s visit have been the following:

Ø To understand the underlying reasons for this violence

Ø To explore ways to counter the impact of this kind of divisive politics in the immediate run-up to elections in the country and towards upholding democracy and secularism

Ø To probe into cases of violence against women during the riots and assess their present situation as women and children continue to be the worst affected by the violence and very often the special violence suffered by them gets overlooked owing to the scale of emergency

Ø To assess the immediate and long term solutions to curb violence and communal hatred and uphold harmony and peace in the area

Ø To explore  measures that could be undertaken by the civil society to make the state accountable towards compensation and rehabilitation of survivors, legal justice and punishment to the guilty as well as restoration of peace and harmony in the region

The team interacted with civil society groups on their first day. The second day was spent in the two relief Camps of Kandhla and Malakpur. The team tried to meet the DM , the SSP and other officials on the 10th but could not as all of them were on field, and not available in their respective offices. We could however meet the ADM-F Muzaffarnagar on the 10th of October. Since, we met the Anhad team which was visiting the area the second time to document cases of violence against women, we decided to focus on other aspects that needed attention.

Download full report here  Muzaffarnagar report-2013

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