In first part of the edit, we were discussing the communal clashes in Muzaffarnagar and police registered cases against 150 people and fourteen were taken into custody. Clashes between the two communities, Hindu Jats and Muslims, in Shamli and Muzaffarnagar grew on 27th August 2013. The original cause of the rioting was disputed according to bipartisan claims largely concerning the affected communities. How did the Muzaffarnagar riots started, and what’s the present situation, no one knows and many have their own version.
Muzaffarnagar riots are an example of what happens when minority appeasement in the name of secularism reaches a disgusting level. Or in the other words when the Hindutva is promoted and minorities left neglected. So the whole unfortunate incident started with a simple case of eve teasing. There was a girl from Muzaffarnagar who was being regularly troubled and molested by a guy named Shahnawaz from neighboring village Kawal. She reported these incidents to her family who took her to the police station to file a case but the police simply refused to take any kind of cognizance or action and drove them away. Now this was not an isolated case of police inaction against Muslims. Ever since SP govt. came to power, the police have been ignoring even the heinous crimes like Rapes if the perpetrators of these crimes are Muslims. There had been a string of rapes and gang-rapes by Muslim youths of the area not only against Jats but also against Dalit women and they had been given a free run by the police which led to an attitude of fearlessness among these criminals.
The same thing happened in this case too. It should be noted even Dalits of the area were boiling in anger against the Muslims at this point and a combined wrath of Jats and Dalits against Muslims was always probable. The nation is boiling because of crimes against women but the police here didn’t even take a note of this continued harassment of a girl. As a result, her brother Sachin when going to college now accompanied the girl. Undeterred even by that, Shahnawaz tried to harass her once again. Sachin then called his cousin Gaurav and confronted Shahnawaz and a scuffle broke out between the two brothers and Shahnawaz. The brothers beat him up; seriously injured him and he had to be taken to the hospital where he died later. After some time though, Sachin and Gaurav were attacked, tortured and killed by a Muslim mob for defending their sister’s honour. As such incidents of women’s harassment by Muslims youths were on a rise and police just refused to help them, the Jats called for Khap Panchyat in which it was decided to call for a ‘Bahu-Beti Samman Bachao’ Mahapanchayat to demand action and justice against the criminal Muslim youths of that area.
People returning from this Panchayat were ensnared with automatic rifles and even killed in droves by some Muslim mobs and their bodies dumped in a nearby canal. Many of these bodies have now been fished out and many are still being searched for. This blew a plug and is considered as a flash point in the starting of the riots as the Jats were already angry and now they were being attacked without any reason. So the Jats, in the heat of the moment, decided to exact revenge instead of waiting for administrative and police help which was never going to come. They started attacking Muslims anywhere and everywhere and killed them in droves. Meanwhile someone circulated a fake video of the incident of the killing of the two brothers that added fuel to the already raging fire. And as usual innocent Muslims had to pay for the mistakes of their radical community members. Now the UP government blamed BJP. The Jats are not one of BJP’s strong vote banks. They usually support the Congress and RLD’s and UPA’s Ajit Singh is their biggest leader. Here they were working under the umbrella of their Khaps and their Panchayats. But BJP’s silent involvement in every communal incident cannot be ignored and their horrendous mistakes, so it happened once again. The media also mindlessly propagated their own theory, as BJP is the easiest scapegoat in any such incident.
Let me bring to your notice, that it was not a Hindu-Muslim riot but a Jat-Muslim riot and members of SP, BSP, Congress and one from BJP too were caught on tape allegedly making provocative speeches. Once again Muslims are being projected as helpless victims and the Jats as oppressors, which is so not true. None of this would have happened if UP government had not adopted an incredibly biased approach in favour of one community at the expense of law and order. Meanwhile, these riots killed around 43 people including a news reporter and a photographer. The casualties occurred before the army was deployed and a curfew was imposed in Muzaffarnagar and nearby Shamli district. Even with the curfew and the use of army, the clashes continued for next three days, with casualties increasing to 43 by September 12, 2013. Then the state home department official said that 38 people died in Muzaffarnagar, 3 in Baghpat, and one each in Saharanpur and Meerut. It was reported on November 15, 2013 that a total of 13 rape and sexual harassment cases were registered over the past two months of rioting and the report named 111 people accused, but no arrests had been made then. A Maha panchayat (great council) of 40 villages was held in Khera, Sardhana on September 29, 2013 to protest against the Uttar Pradesh government charging the local BJP led MLA Sangeet Singh Som under the National Security Act. The incident is widely seen as repercussion of the violence that took place in September 2014 during Lok Sabha elections. In May 2014, Bharatiya Janata Party won the parliamentary elections in Muzaffarnagar district, along with all the seats in Uttar Pradesh. BJP led MP Sanjeev Balyan, a Jat leader became a Union minister of the Narendra Modi government. Those days approximately 50,000 people have been displaced. Some of them took shelter at state-run relief camps. But so far no government bothered to find out what happened to the displaced Muslims and those who are still languishing in relief camps, meanwhile BJP came up with Kairana’s Hindu migration issue but they could not succeed.
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