Author: S.N.M. ABDI in New Delhi
Publication: South China Morning
Post
Date: March 20, 2001
The country's leading Muslim cleric,
Syed Ahmad Bukhari, has accused Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of fanning communal violence in
Kanpur to divert attention from the arms bribery scandal engulfing the
Government. The death toll from clashes between Hindus and Muslims in the
riot-torn city rose yesterday as the opposition paralysed both Houses of
Parliament for the fifth day, demanding the Government's resignation.
As many as 27 people have been killed,
21 of them Muslims, since Friday in Hindu-Muslim clashes in BJP-ruled Uttar
Pradesh and there are widespread fears of larger-scale sectarian violence
across the country.
Sectarian clashes have also been
reported from Pune and Aurangabad in western India.
A senior government official said
there were intelligence reports of communal tension rising dangerously
in many cities in northern India. Prominent Muslim leaders called on President
Kocheri Raman Narayanan and Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani yesterday,
seeking their immediate intervention to diffuse the situation.
Mr Bukhari said the police in the
industrial city of Kanpur fired indiscriminately on Muslims who were protesting
against the burning of a copy of the Koran in New Delhi.
He said the killings were continuing
unabated in Kanpur as the BJP administration was deliberately fanning communal
unrest with "ulterior motives".
Fanatical Hindu groups burned a
copy of the Koran on March 5 during protests in New Delhi over the destruction
of Buddha statues in Afghanistan. Indian newspapers desisted from publishing
photographs of the burning of the Muslims' holy book.
But pictures of the incident were
downloaded from a foreign Internet site, yahoonews.com, and pasted on the
walls of mosques in Kanpur and other cities.
Armed with copies of the offending
photographs, a delegation of Muslim leaders met Mr Vajpayee on March 12,
a day before Indian news portal tehelka.com released an arms bribery video
that threw the Government into disarray.
Within hours of the meeting with
Mr Vajpayee, the ultra-right Shiv Sena group, which had been photographed
burning a copy of the Koran outside the UN building in New Delhi, were
arrested and jailed for a fortnight pending their trial for offending religious
sentiments.
But when Muslims staged a peaceful
protest march in Kanpur on Friday - while political uncertainty gripped
the country - police fired indiscriminately on the demonstrators. Soon
Hindu mobs got into the act and the situation spun out of control.
Mr Bukhari said that deliberate
attacks on Muslims by policemen were fanning the flames in Kanpur.
He said the Uttar Pradesh Government
did not want normality to return to Kanpur as long as there was political
uncertainty in New Delhi.
Independent observers have also
criticised police action against Muslims.
Newspapers have carried stories
about the predominantly Hindu armed constabulary burning mosques and looting
homes of Muslims who are demanding deployment of the army, which has a
secular track record.
