Communal divide complete in Malegaon

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

MUMBAI, OCT. 31. Malegaon burned, lives were lost and Maharashtra once again tops the chart of communal locations in the country. The trouble was aggravated mainly because of three reasons: inept handling by police, a history of communally divisive politics in a decrepit town which cannot manage its own affairs - it does not even want to become a Municipal Corporation from a Council - and a total lack of anticipation by the authorities.

Malegaon, 110 km from Nasik, has a history of communal trouble, going back to 1962. It saw riots in 1984. Also

in 1992, when Mr. Nihal Ahmed, the six-time Janata Dal MLA from the town, took out a procession against a possible demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya. The town witnessed violence after the demolition, replicating Mumbai's worst riots. It is one town with a Muslim majority.

Residents concede that for the first time, the divide between the two communities was complete. They speak of ``how retaliation of this kind was never seen before.'' In a town where any impending election - this time, it is to the civic body in December - leads to communal tensions, people are not likely to forget the riots. Even the drinking water pipelines were broken. That day, when the SRP constable saw the man, charged with the post-Namaz Friday sermon, distributing handbills, he neither read them nor asked what they carried but plucked them out of his hands and tore them up. That pamphlet was already in circulation in Mumbai, announcing a fatwa from the Jamat-ul-Ulema that products of multinational corporations (MNCs) be boycotted since profits from them helped assaults on the innocent people in Chechnya, Bosnia, Palestine, Somalia and now Afghanistan.

It made no laudatory reference to either the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. But, after the rioting, when the youths were taken to the police station, they gave their names which carried the Bin Laden suffix.

It started as a people versus police incident; the people being those who came out of the mosque. As in 1992, here the police became the targets of the mob and the retaliation led to deaths of Muslims and soon, in an inexplicable manner - this is what a future probe which the Government has been saying is possible, should look into more than anything else - turned communal.

All night long the loudspeakers of the mosques blared, sources say and rumours spread and soon, the two communities were battling it out. This, in a town, where during the times of intermittent calm of years separated by riots, people speak of Hindus and Muslims being - the figure of speech is relevant in a town making textiles using powerlooms - ``the warp and the weft'' of the town.

Despite its history, the authorities, Mumbai- downwards, did not anticipate the trouble. Malegaon's Muslims had migrated to the town in search of livelihood from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and they are in conflict with the local, old Marathi converts to Islam who are known as Deccani Muslims.

None of the people there seems to have any personal stake in the town, except for what they can wrest: political or monetary gains. In Mumbai, the Police Commissioner, Mr. M.N. Singh, asked the mullahs and the others to tone down their rhetoric and keep off public places in case they planned any protest against the bombing of Afghanistan. His no-nonsense approach put the lid on any potential mischief.

Why this was not done in Malegaon is not a mystery. Policemen on the streets were not sensitised to find how a delicate communal cauldron, long on simmer, could come to a boil: an eye-batting moment. Once the trouble spread, they seemed woefully lacking in initiative. The town had the Army called in so swiftly.

On October 19, a week preceding the riots, Mr. Ahmed, who now heads the Janata Dal in Maharashtra, was given permission to hold a rally where he preached peace but says some hotheads brought along pictures of Osama bin Laden. This might have triggered tensions since the Congress (I) MLA, Mr. Rashid Sheikh, who defeated Mr. Ahmed, too is competing for the same political space, long dominated by Mr. Ahmed. Such people play for high stakes.

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