Author: Miloni Bhatt
Publication: NDTV
Date: July 10, 2006
URL: http://www.ndtv.com/morenews/showmorestory.asp?slug=Bhiwandi+falls+prey+to+hardline+politics&id=90028&category=National
The origins of the Shiv Sena's new muscle
flexing are in the powerloom town of Bhiwandi which has been a minefileld
of opportunistic minority politicians.
Groups whose attempts to incite retaliation
are playing into the hands of the Sena's hard line politics.
In the late 80s, it was men like Abdul Sattar,
a municipal official, Achyut Shetty, a grocer and Suresh Khopade, a police
officer, who helped keep the peace in Bhiwandi.
The area with its Muslim majority and failing
powerlooms could have been the perfect cocktail for religious tension.
In 1984 Bhiwandi witnessed bloody riots in
which 200 people had been killed. But since then there has been no such incident
even during the 1992 and 1993 riots.
Now, men like Sattar are angry that their
town is burning after 20 years of peace.
Selfish politics
Peace, that he says, has been shattered by
social organisations with political aspirations.
"We are angry. So are people associated
with Raza Academy. The tension escalated because of them. And they've now
created problem between the Muslims and the police. What do they want to achieve?
They want to become a leader of all Muslims," said Sattar, a Mohalla
Committee Member.
Sattar and Shetty were part of the Mohalla
Committees of Bhiwandi set up after the 84 riots and which became a world
famous experiment.
It was started by a DCP, who studied case
diaries of 136 people charged in Bhiwandi riots and hit a pattern.
Only three per cent of the accused had criminal
backgrounds.
Rest were all innocent people ideologically
brainwashed and had given in to lack of trust or rumor mongering.
''Our approach to riots is fire-fighting.
We don't think of preventing communal riots. We simply lathicharge, throw
teargas shells, arrest some people, chargesheet them and send them to court,"
said Suresh Khopade, Railway Police Commissioner.
"We come back to our barracks and wait
for the second call of riots. That's when I decided to do something,"
he added.
And that was peace committees one for every
mohalla.
They had members from police and both the
communities who monitored against any communal flare-up on a day-to-day basis.
''Hindu-Muslims came on one platform and prejudices
came down. They brought all non-cognisable offences to these committees to
be solved. And since the plaintiff, the complainant and the adjudicator were
all from the same mohalla, justice was swift," said Khopade.
With this the intelligence network of the
police also improved.
The police became less communally divided
and started taking more people into confidence.
Bhiwandi was calm right through flashpoints
like Babri and Gujarat.
Complacency
But today as Achyut Shetty looks back at that
time, he says this success led to complacency.
''Around 90 per cent Mohalla Committees have
become defunct. Nobody pays any attention to them anymore. This has created
a rift between the police and the people,'' said Shetty.
This allowed political ambitions to rupture
the peace in Bhiwandi.
Groups like the Raza Acdemy and the Samajwadi
Party's Abu Azmi played a key role in inciting the mobs that clashed with
the police over ownership of a piece of land.
That violence saw two protestors die in police
firing. Two constables were also stabbed and burnt.
Wednesday's violence has spurred the police
into action.
They fixed a meeting of the police with the
women of both communities. This is an attempt at dialogue once again to give
peace a chance.
