The Riot

The riot in Bhopal beginning on 7 December was a direct consequence of the BJP combine's destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya the preceding day. Although Indore and other cities in MP had experienced riots in the past, Bhopal had always been considered a model of communal harmony. On the evening of 7 December, thousands of young Muslim men gathered on the large thoroughfares of Bhopal to express their anger and grief at events in Ayodhya. Some threw sticks, stones, and homemade bombs at Hindu-owned shops as well as public vehicles and property; they did not attack people. I returned to Bhopal to learn what had precipitated a major riot in which official sources estimate that 143 people were killed; Jabbar placed the figure closer to 250, the majority of whom were Muslims. About 30,000 people, predominantly Muslims, were displaced.

Given the likelihood that tensions would escalate once the destruction of the mosque became known, it is curious that the government posted only a small police force in troubled parts of the city. Anatulla Siddiqi, president of Congress I in a locality called Kazi Camp, went to one of the central shopping areas where violence had broken out. He said that the few police posted there helplessly appealed to him to quell the violence. Siddiqi estimated that 12 people were killed and 22 people injured that day; shooting by the police rather than Hindu-Muslim clashes accounted for most
of the violence. By the next day another 12 people had been killed.18 "This was not a Hindu-Muslim riot but a state-sponsored riot," commented N. Rajan, the highly respected editor of the National Mail newspaper.19 The riots also marked the culmination of the state's growing tendency to victimize the Muslim community.

By 9 December mobs of Hindu men forcibly entered Muslim homes, ransacked their belongings, and often killed or maimed a family member. Many of these men were associated with the Bajrang Dal (the youth wing of the Hindu religious organization that has spearheaded the campaign in Ayodhya), and they were sometimes accompanied by "kar sevaks" (temple volunteers) who had stopped in Bhopal while returning from Ayodhya. Shama Begum, a Kazi Camp resident, said that some men had forced their way into her house and
shouted: "You have turned this place into a little Pakistan, now you will pay for it!"20 They emptied trunks of clothes and containers of grain and smashed whatever they could, and they threatened to return that night to rape the family's young, unmarried daughter. As they were leaving they caught sight of her husband. Almost as an afterthought they murdered him. Shama Begum left her husband's body in the house and took her daughters to spend the night with some Hindu neighbors.

The slums that suffered the greatest damage were new settlements like Arif Nagar, which had not had time to develop a sense of community among Hindu and Muslim residents since it had been formed only in 1987 at the impetus of Arif Aqueel. When a mob of 2,000 Hindus arrived there on the afternoon of 8 May shouting "Jai Shri Ram" (Victory to Lord Ram!), most residents sought to escape. Although they were spared by the mobs, Hindu families risked the destruction of their huts in the event of arson. The mobs destroyed 300 of the 795 huts in Arif Nagar, within several hours demolishing illegal encroachments that the government had targeted.

Few areas of Bhopal were spared. Although violence in communal riots is usually directed at poor slum dwellers, there were numerous middle-class Muslim families in the Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited (BHEL) township of Bhopal who also lost their homes and even their lives. However, as in the past, slum dwellers suffered the most serious damage. The Madhya Pradesh Vigyan Sabha, an independent voluntary organization, surveyed 7,684 people who were living in makeshift refugee camps because their homes had been destroyed, and she found that 47 percent of them were from the laboring poor.

The violence had particularly devastating consequences for the gas survivors. The first items that mobs threw into the fire were handcarts, bicycle rickshaws (bicycle-drawn vehicles), and sewing machines, which many of the gas survivors used to earn their livelihood. Given the paltry compensation that the government provided for such losses and the fact that many of these people were already entangled in elaborate paper work filing claims for relief, many would never be compensated. One woman from Sudama Nagar commented: "The gas was better, at least it did not divide the people.

The state, political parties, and independent activists played out the roles scripted for them in past tragedies. The state government was paralyzed while Bhopal went up in flames. Some speculated that it deliberately tolerated Muslim aggression in order to justify subsequent Hindu violence. The state government made M.A. Khan, a weak and pliable administrator, the collector of Bhopal. As a Muslim he was both a convenient token and a scapegoat. Khan had executed the BJP's anti-encroachment drive. On 7 December he issued a report to the chief secretary stating that the situation was under control. By contrast, preventive action by Vijay Singh, the commissioner of Indore, had maintained peace in what was considered a "riot prone" city.

After the evening of 7 December, numerous citizens had called members of the administration, police, and government and pleaded with them for more forceful intervention. "I met with Gour on the morning of the eighth and begged him to call out the army," Jabbar reported. "He said, `How can I go out when a curfew is in force?!'" Siddiqi said that the only way he could get the police control room to respond to his calls was by pretending to be a Hindu and reporting that Hindus were in danger. This was not a very useful ploy, however, for when the police arrived, they offered protection exclusively to Hindus. In many localities, Muslims said that police demonstrated such obvious bias that Muslims ceased to appeal to the police for help. In some areas Hindu gangs actually donned police uniforms. The violence declined swiftly after the army was deployed on 12 December and ended shortly after president's rule was declared on 15 December, tragic testimony to how much sooner the violence could have been averted.

The task of challenging the state's complicity and lethargy and organizing protection for the victims should have fallen to Congress, the major opposition party in the state. However, while a few Congress leaders like Digvijay Singh and a number of local party members tried to restore order, the Congress Party seemed much more concerned with dismissing the BJP government than with stopping Hindu violence. Even after the center dismissed the state government and declared president's rule, the state government established few camps to shelter those who had been rendered destitute. Communal organizations stepped in by opening camps exclusively for either Hindus or Muslims.

Independent citizen groups offered the only effective opposition to the state and communal organizations. They formed committees to safeguard their localities by fighting back the mobs. These committees sought to repair mosques and temples before the damage provided a pretext for further violence. They also played a critical role in organizing relief. The women activists of the BGPMUS who had previously surveyed the gas-disaster victims returned to the same families to assess the damage they had suffered in the riots.