Riot after riot in Akhilesh Yadav’s Uttar Pradesh
When Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav was giving the final touches to the speech he was to deliver on completion of six months in office last Friday, almost 300 km from Lucknow, 14 years old Luckmaan was on his way from Meerut to Ghaziabad to meet his grandfather Younis.
Luckmaan never made it to his grandfather’s house, less than 100 km from Meerut.
The next day, when Akhilesh Yadav was telling the media about improvement in governance, Luckmaan’s family members found his body in the Ghaziabad police station. He had taken two police bullets –- one on his head and other stomach. Police say the 14-year-old died on the spot.
Six persons died, five of them teenagers, and over a dozen were injured in the Dasna riots after pages of a Quran were allegedly found on rail tracks with a mobile number scribbled on it. Local residents quoted by media say that public address systems at mosques were used to incite crowds in response to some alleged desecrated pages of the Quran which were found at a platform of the Adhyatmik Nagar railway station in Dasna. The incitement to rioting also spread by way of SMSes and soon a sizable crowd armed with country-made weapons and inflammables assembled and ran riot.
Though the Chief Minister has ordered a probe into this violence, repeated riots have dented Akhilesh’s claim of restoring law and order in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh.
This is the 11th riot –- seven of them Hindu-Muslim -– reported in last six months of Akhilesh Yadav’s rule. The riots have taken the lives of 18 people and 72 others have been injured. It was the political compulsion of Muslim-appeasement that made Akhilesh’s Government look the other way as Muslims went berserk in Lucknow, Allahabad and Kanpur after Friday prayers to protest atrocities against Muslims in Myanmar. Police opened fire in Allahabad and Kanpur while in Lucknow belligerent
Muslim youth damaged public property and set private vehicles on fire as bewildered commuters ran for cover. A curfew was imposed in Allahabad and continued for almost six days.
No one has been arrested in these cases because the Maulanas want none of their men touched. Their word was communicated to political bosses, and thus, the cases are now buried deep in the rigmarole of red tape.
Senior police officials expressed ignorance about the riotous assembly and said no intelligence regarding the riots had been received. Post the riots, on Sunday, three police officers were suspended over ‘intelligence failure’. “Station Officer Masuri P K Singh, SSI Local Intelligence Unit Jal Singh Saini and SI LIU D P Singh have been suspended for their failure to control the situation and provide the intelligence inputs,” said Prashant Kumar, SSP Ghaziabad. The Uttar Pradesh Government also ordered an inquiry in addition to announced a compensation of Rs 5 lakh each to the kin of those killed. In addition, a Rs 50,000 compensation was announced for those seriously injured and Rs 25,000 for those who suffered minor injuries.
The communal fire which began from Kosikalan in Mathura in the first week of June spread to Pratapgarh in eastern UP and then to Saharanpur. Hindus and Muslims clashed in Allahabad, and when Ramzan began, four police stations in Bareilly city were rocked by riots.
Uttar Pradesh is crucial to Samajwadi Party for its political survival in Lok Sabha elections. The party is eyeing 60 out of 80 Lok Sabha seats from this state, home to almost 20 crore people. Muslims form a major chunk of the party’s vote bank. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections the party won only 22 seats because Muslims deserted Mulayam Singh for his association with Kalyan Singh and voted in favour of the Congress.
This time Mulayam does not want to take chances and therefore is trying to keep Muslims in good humour. A classic case of political appeasement is on display in Bareilly where curfew was clamped three times in the last 180 days. When police raided Samajwadi Party corporator Aslam Kabadi’s house on August 16, he managed to escape butthe police did manage to stumble upon a cache of arms and ammunition. Police declared Aslam an absconder but on August 18 -– two days before Eid — he was seen in the company of Senior Superintendent of Police in a Roza Iftar party as Bareilly continued to burn in communal fires.
Senior police officials recount how Noor Jahan, a clerk in Samajwadi Party’s office in Lucknow, asked Inspector General Bareilly zone to suspend an Inspector because he dared arrest her husband who was charged with inciting people in Faridpur locality of Bareilly. The IG succumbed to the pressure and suspended the Inspector.
Time is running out for Akhilesh Yadav as well as his father Mulayam Singh Yadav. Though Mulayam had asked senior Ministers and officers to keep party workers, particularly Muslims, in good humour, there is a bigger question –- whether this appeasement policy will work. Hindus have already started questioning the Samajwadi Party Government’s bias towards Muslims. If this anger turns into votes in the 2014 elections it could well spell trouble for the Samajwadi Party.
