Ayodhya aftermath: Staying together
Down to Earth, 28 February 1993
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Staying together
All too predictably, the demolition of the mosque at Ayodhya had violent repercussions throughout the country. More than 2,300 people were killed and at least 5,500 people injured in the aftermath. And, two months after the demolition, tension still prevails in some pockets.
The city hit hardest was Bombay, the country’s commercial capital and home to Indians of every conceivable colour, caste and creed. The virulence of the violence in the city was entirely unexpected. In other places, the violence if not as widespread, was equally devastating. Riots broke out in tension-filled Ahmedabad and Surat and in Bhopal. In Uttar Pradesh, the worst affected – in the number of deaths – was Kanpur, with Varanasi also trapped briefly by violence. The communal frenzy stretched out to Calcutta, Hyderabad and Bangalore.
But there were some differences in the pattern of the current round of rioting. There was little brutality in communally sensitive Bihar. An aspect of the violence, this time around, was that the rioting was not entirely by the poor and unemployed. There were reports of many instances of looting of shops and homes by residents of middle-class neighbourhoods.
But what has emerged clearly is that not all of India burned. Away from the glare of newspaper and television coverage of the rio-affected cities, calm prevailed in places known in the past to be prone to communal violence or tension. Three such areas are Bhiwandi, in Maharashtra’s Thane district; Bhagalpur, a Bihar city where rioting raged in 1989, and the industrial Okhla suburb of south Delhi.
Preserving the peace in Bhiwandi, Bhagalpur and Okhla became possible because of determined efforts of the residents and strong community initiatives.
In the Tatarpur area of Bhagalpur, local residents formed groups of volunteer sentries and kept strict vigil to keep trouble-making elements far away. In Bhiwandi, the peace was maintained by 70 mohalla committees, each consisting of representatives of both communities, and an alert local administration, with the police rehearsing riot control tactics even prior to the demolition in Ayodhya. In Okhla, elders from both communities not only persuaded hotheads not to seek revenge, but they also set up a committee to investigate and expose the falsity of rumours being spread to trigger violence.
