Ah, sister-town of Malegaon: Dhulia!!!

Coming on the heels of the bomb blast of September 29 2008 in Malegaon, the communal flare up in Dhulia is the last straw that threatens to break the back of the camel that is the state of Maharashtra. Or is it the early straw in the wind? Will it spiral into full-blown pogrom as is underway in Orissa’s Kanthamal district? Or is it still a matter of time? However, what is truthfully most horrendous is that the severity of the systematic attacks and arson should have been ‘sky rocketed’ after the visit of the state home minister RR Patil and the Director General of Police AN Roy. The forbidding faces of these two men looked already quite grim when they had toured Malegaon only last week.

An image of how the organized marauding brigades have wrought havoc is the victim, Karimullah Lal Mohammad. He had got down at the crossing on the Agra road near the Gurduwara of Dhulia as he traveled from Malegaon. A group of youths on motorcycles swooped upon him and pulled him down and mercilessly beat him. This fifty-plus man of humble origin was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was at a loss to understand how the fury had over taken him so swiftly and him so unaware! The travail and trauma of the unwary stranger is a saga of suffering that all human beings dread most. Karimullah was a stranger to the town as he had gone there to meet his truck-driver son who was passing Dhulia on his way to their town in north of India. The son had saved some money and wanted to give it to his lonely father staying in Malegaon. The Id festival was still fresh. The eyes of Karimullah were transfixed in shock, surprise and pain at the cops who stood nearby and did nothing to save him. Fortunately he survived, four others from his community lost their lives to the mobs and police bullet.

Hundreds of people from Malegaon travel to Dhulia daily for shopping, medical treatment, meeting relatives as well as students commuting to medical and engineering colleges. Dhulia is the biggest market for buffaloes in Maharashtra. Dealers in animals gather there Sunday to Tuesday from neighboring Malegaon and from as far as Kathiyawad.

The organized and well planned attacks on the Muslim houses and commercial establishments threaten to destroy the extremely close relationship between the people of the two towns. They had nurtured it over more than a century. Moreover the town was free from the kind of communal tension and strife that has almost undone Malegaon. The two towns seem to have been joined as twins by the same umbilical cord. The Agra road connects them like artery supplying nourishment to thousands of people who depend on the road and live on both the sides of it. But there was something else in their fate. The garages and mechanical shops in auto industry and the uncountable hotels and motels and other satellite commercial establishments bore the brunt. Most among them were owned by Muslims and were systematically looted and burnt.

The Marathi Sakal news network editor Uttam Kamble saw a scene at 6 p.m. on October 5 in which a crowd of youths and young children (choteya poranche) was setting fire to a garage. What is disturbing here is the induction of the young children! Catch them young is the motto of the extremist right wing. What would happen whey this young generation comes to age! This is a frightening premonition of the future of our common destiny. Passersby were watching where this agitated mob would go and how much would they do. All this not far from the Memorial of Shaheed Hameed who had attacked Pakistani tanks and destroyed them in the most ferocious battle near Lahore. One such Pak tank is put up as a trophy in the traffic island of Hameed chowk.

If that is what was happening in the evening, in the night according to the reporter of Urdu Times Aziz Ejaz there were conflagrations all over the town!

As the casualties started coming in at the civil hospital the mobs intimidated and scared away the Muslims from seeking medical help or treatment. Some medical doctors wearing Muslim skullcaps had trouble helping the injured as the Shiv Sainiks objected their presence obviously for their look? But the collector intervened and assured the mob that it was their conventional dress and nothing more.

Strangely, the alibi the police offer that their Dhulia contingents were deployed in Malegaon and so the situation went out of control in Dhulia is anomalous since Dhulia has district headquarters of state reserve police force as well. It hardly takes an hour to move over to Dhulia from Malegaon. Trouble started with provocative banners and notice boards put up by Hindu Rakshak Sabha in the morning itself while curfew was declared after four in the evening. Much like Gujarat the violence was well planned and coordinated. At one time the mob attacked additional collector of Dhulia district Mustak Patel who has passed into coma since the attack. In one place the mob of the majority community attacked a ghetto and when people within the ghetto came out the police allegedly moved to the front of the mob of the majority and confronted the inmates of the ghetto with guns. This is obviously state complicity.

It is disturbing to note that the miniscule minority of Muslims scattered in pockets of ghettoes all over Dhulia town and overwhelmed by a huge majority of Hindus should be subjected to desecration of some two dozen mosques and burning of nearly two thousand houses! Even children of two to four year’s age group were brutalized. If this were the beginning of havoc in Maharashtra what would be the end!