Nearly 5,000 people are still living in Muzaffarnagar camps because they say they are too afraid to venture out.
As thousands confront the Uttar Pradesh winter with flimsy tents and not enough blankets in the refugee camps of Muzaffarnagar, a senior official in the state government believes the dropping temperature is no big deal.
"Nobody dies of the cold; if people did, then nobody would survive in Siberia," said AK Gupta, one of the most senior bureaucrats in the state government.
(Reactions on UP babu's Siberia shocker) |
(Your Comments)
Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav said hours later, "In this age of television and cameras, people from our party and government should choose their words carefully so they don't hurt anyone's feelings."
His government has been assailed by NGOs and opposition parties for its apathy to the families living in the makeshift camps in Muzaffarnagar after Hindu-Muslim violence earlier this year left them homeless.
Nearly 60 people were killed; 40,000 people moved into camps in the western part of the state.
Many of them accepted a five-lakh payout by the government as compensation and bought land to build new homes. But 5,000 people remain in the camps because they say they are too afraid to venture out. Their survival is being guided largely by NGOs who say the government delivers neither woollens nor food.
Earlier this week, Mulayam Singh Yadav, the chief of the ruling Samajwadi Party, claimed that those living in the camps are not victims of violence, but trouble-makers planted by opposition parties.
(No riot victims, only political activists in Muzaffarnagar camps now, says Mulayam Singh)Yesterday, the government admitted that 34 children have died since the communal riots, 10 of them in the relief camps, and the others in private or government hospitals.