But he, like thousands of his neighbors, said he would still refuse to return home.

“Look, they come to us and say, ‘Please come back, it’s our responsibility to make sure you’re safe,' ” said Mr. Akhtar, 40, a construction worker whose bare feet, clad in rubber slippers, were chalky and deeply cracked. “We don’t believe them. Where was their responsibility when we were being attacked? We were trying to call people for help, but the police had their phone switched off.”

There is nothing new about religious violence in India, or the malignant, slow-moving changes that follow in its wake. Though riots here generally last a few days, coming to a halt when the police arrive in force, by that time they have already altered the social fabric, injecting suspicion and paranoia into regions where religious groups once mixed freely. In the western state of Gujarat, more than 20,000 Muslims who fled during the riots of 2002 were still living in relief camps 10 years later, according to Amnesty International.

The divisions are made worse by the miserable conditions that often await those who flee.

Over the years, India has managed to provide adequate relief for survivors of natural disasters, but not for riot victims — at different points they have been Muslims, Hindu Pandits and Sikhs — in large part because it is politically risky to take sides in such a conflict, critics say.

But this winter, a crucial election season, the squalid camps came to bear their own risks, standing as graphic evidence of state failure, said Farah Naqvi, a writer and activist. So they, too, are disappearing.

“Once they have scattered to the wind, the story stops,” she said. “The job for those of us trying to give any kind of relief becomes nearly impossible, though we are trying to track clusters of survivors. It is an attempt to obliterate any evidence of the camps, and the survivors are now scattered to the wind.”