AHMEDABAD 'It's the election that brings us here. We dread coming back,' Rahima Ansari said, standing outside her old family house that was gutted by rioting Hindu mobs seven years ago, AFP reported.
'The blaze blackened the walls of the house and our lives,' said Ansari, one of thousands of Muslims who saw friends and family members killed in anti-Muslim riots that swept the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002.
Along with her son Yusuf, a 55-year-old trader, she had returned to her old neighbourhood in Gujarat's main city Ahmedabad, with all its painful memories, to vote in India's general election.
The 2002 riots in which more than 2,000 people died — most of them Muslims — were the worst outbreak of communal violence in India since the partition of the sub-continent.
The carnage came after a suspected Muslim mob burnt alive 59 Hindus on a train.
Earlier this week, India's Supreme Court added some spice to Thursday's vote by ordering a special police team to investigate charges that Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, had incited the Hindu rioters to violence.
'I am voting to ensure that Modi is arrested and is punished for all the crimes he has committed against Muslims,' said Yusuf Ansai as he waited to cast his ballot.
One member of the Ansari family was burned alive in the fire that engulfed their home, and the others escaped by breaking a glass window and fleeing the neighbourhood.
More than 300 areas affected by the riots voted in Thursday's polling, which was marked by heavy security, with police frisking all voters before allowing them into the ballot box area.
Modi has denounced the Supreme Court order as politically motivated, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) placed ads in Gujarati newspapers Thursday urging voters to prevent the chief minister being 'victimised.'
'I saw that advertisement,' said Rehana Bano, another victim of the 2002 riots. 'I pray to Allah that Modi goes to jail soon.' In other areas of the city, many voters said they were primarily concerned with the state of the local economy and how the current global slowdown might impact on Gujarat, which has recorded double-digit growth in recent years.
'A strong coalition government should be elected to power as it will keep the stock market steady. If a weak coalition is elected then I am sure that the markets will go... red,' said 42-year-old Chintan Parikh, a stock broker in Ahmedabad.
A BJP supporter, Parikh said Gujarat needed a leader like Modi whose corporate savvy and business-friendly policies have been behind the state's growing prosperity.
Young, first-time voters, some sporting sun glasses and iPods, were also out in force, casting their ballots with no outward sign of feeling the weight of recent history on their shoulders.
'I'll vote and then go for a movie with my friends,' said 19-year-old student Sanjana Patel.
