Speck Of Sand In The Eye

The bricks lie strewn around, each with ‘Khan’ inscribed on it, pertaining to the kiln it originated from. Two weeks back, they were the wall of a mosque under construction in Kadalpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddh Nagar district that borders Delhi. Today, they are the reason the UP government finds itself pitted against popular will in the country. When the district’s sub-divisional magistrate, the 28-year-old Durga Shakti Nagpal, ordered the clearing of this mosque, in keeping with a 2009 ruling of the Supreme Court—which prohibited the construction of religious places on public land (in this case land belonging to the gram sabha)—her political masters in Lucknow didn’t reward her. Instead, they had her suspended, throwing the rulebook out of the window but making a pointedly overt play for their Muslim votebank. In their mind, perhaps even enlarging it.

While this action outraged many, it surprised few. It possibly would have, had it come 17 months back when Akhilesh Yadav was sworn in as the chief minister. When his father Mulayam Singh Yadav anointed him as the head of the Samajwadi Party government in Lucknow, the young, foreign-educated scion was seen as some kind of messiah who would not only lift the outdated image of the party but also deliver the state from years of neglect and misgovernance. However, any expectation from the young politician—the youngest ever to be sworn in as CM at 38—is fast getting overshadowed by his administration’s failure to pull back UP from its rapid descent into chaos and communalisation.

And the suspension of the 2010 batch IAS officer, who has displayed extraordinary mettle on her first posting as SDM in taking on the all-powerful sand mining mafia, has become one more chapter in UP’s continuing saga of infamy. Espe­cially as SP leader and cabinet minister Narendra Bhati, who is also the party’s declared candidate from GB Nagar for the 2014 Lok Sabha election, went about bragging, “It took me just 41 minutes to get Durga Shakti Nagpal suspended.” It was he who had in June this year laid the foundation brick of the mosque which has now been declared illegal, prompting rival politicians to ask how come a ruling party minister was associated with an illegal construction.

Not just that, Bhati arrived at the scene not on July 27, the day the wall was brought down, but a day after when Nagpal had been suspended, casting himself as the ‘saviour’ of Kadalpur’s Muslims. The state machinery played along, stoutly denying that the punitive action was ordered under pressure from the sand mining mafia. His colleague and Mulayam’s brother Shivpal Yadav went a step ahead and said her actions could have caused riots.

Mission solidarity A candlelight march for Durga by AIDWA. (Photograph by Nirala Tripathi)

The political plan became apparent with none other than UP health minister Ahmad Hasan blurting it out at a ‘roza iftar’ party the CM hosted in Lucknow last Sunday (the ruling SP is now naturally hoping to reap a rich dividend of Muslim votes). Talking to a gathering of Muslims and mediapersons, he said, “SP president Mulayam Singh Yadav had protected the Babri mosque in Ayodhya when it was attacked in 1992; today his son Akhilesh Yadav has done the same by sacking an officer who ordered demolition of the wall of a mosque in Greater Noida”. Not quite done, he drove home the point: “We Muslims ought to express our gratitude to the ruling party for that.”

Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari

Back in Kadalpur, where Muslims make up around 70 per cent of the village’s 5,000-strong population, Nagpal is certainly no hero. Locals have, in fact, welcomed her suspension. She caught them on the wrong foot, they say, since they did not have the requisite permission from the government to construct on public land. But she could have warned them first or been more compassionate when she arrived at the site. “We, including the elders and our women, pleaded with her to stop the demolition,” says Mohammed Nasruddin, a local. “We told her we would seek whatever permission was required after Id. Anyway, there was no construction going on. But she wouldn’t have any of it. She was so determined that she told us she would have it destroyed even if it took her three days.”

Despite the uncertainty, locals continue to pray at the site under tarpaulin sheets. A mangled wreck of a pvc water tank, used by the locals to store water, lies nearby.

Another resident, Ausaf Ali, says their mosque was unfairly singled out. “There are so many mosques and temples being constructed on gram sabha land around Dankaur (the local nagar panchayat).” Village pradhan Shafique Khan says they will now ask for permission to continue constructing the mosque.

With even Hindus contributing for the construction of the mosque, locals say their village has been largely peaceful. The latest incident, however, has fuelled speculation about who really complained to the local administration in the first place about the construction of the mosque. “We now have a nagging worry that some Hindu may have complained,” says Fateh Mohammed, another local. Some reports have suggested that the complaint came from a local Youth Congress leader, whose brother feared an encroachment on his plot adjacent to the mosque.

However, the suggestion that Durga herself has a possible bias against Muslims has had to be withdrawn, given that she had similarly ensured the clearing of at least one Hindu shrine in neighbouring Niloni Shahpur village. Officials of a local Waqf committee are even accusing the state government of bringing back a thoroughly ‘corrupt’ SDM to replace Durga. “The new SDM faced charges of grabbing huge Waqf properties for which I myself lodged an FIR against him,” said Qader Khan, secretary of Hazrat Syed Bhure Shah Waqf Committee.

But while the SP may proclaim that it foregrounds the interests of Muslims, the state has witnessed more than two dozen major and minor incidents of communal violence under its rule. The government is also yet to release Muslims arrested under terror charges—something the party leaders had during elections said they would do as soon as they came to power. A protest that has been going on since May 22 demanding the release of these individuals, and making public the R.D. Nimesh Commission’s report, which questions the arrest of two Muslims youths on terror charges, still continues in the state capital. The state government’s double standards were on show again when no action was initiated against officers who stood by as sectarian clashes broke out between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Lucknow on August 2.

While poor policing has been UP’s bane for many years, things have turned worse under the present dispensation. If some senior cops are to be believed, this is the result of a breakdown in the chain of command—with Yadav cops unbridled and going berserk. They are said to be virtually dominating at the thana level now. And it’s not just the police who are the beneficiaries of the SP’s special patronage, IAS and IPS officers of the Yadav community too are being imported from distant state cadres like Punjab and Maharashtra.

While law and order have never been the best under the Samajwadi regimes of the past, the situation has become so dire under Akhilesh’s rule that even his father couldn’t help expressing his dissatisfaction publicly in August last year. “Lots need to be done on the law and order front in the state; left to me, I would set it right in a matter of two weeks,” Mulayam had declared before TV cameras, much to his son’s embarrassment. In fact, Akhilesh’s loosening grip over his administration had begun to show early with the glaring presence of multiple power centres. So much so it spawned a joke in which UP is described as being a state with ‘five-and-a-half chief ministers’, Akhilesh being the sidekick ‘half’. The ‘big five’ are openly identified as Mulayam himself, his brother Shivpal, his cousin and party general secretary Ram Gopal Yadav, minister Azam Khan and the 1990 batch IAS officer who is also secretary to the CM, Anita Singh.

The father-son duo’s election promise of initiating action against Mayawati and her officers has also been conveniently forgotten. Indisputably, it was this commitment that had contributed in some measure to the surge favouring SP, whose tally of 224 seats in the 402-member assembly exceeded the party’s own expectations. However, far from initiating any punitive measures against the previous regime’s wrongdoings, Akhilesh has gone overboard in appeasing his party’s most sworn adversaries in the BSP.

Mayawati, in fact, is coming across as a more effective administrator, at least as far as governance issues, especially law and order, are concerned. Victory came easy to the SP this time, but it could well fritter it away.

***

Here, There, Everywhere: UP Under Akhilesh

• Bareilly August 12, 2012 Communal violence during a religious procession leading to clamping of curfew.
• Bareilly Jul 23, 2012 Communal clash. One killed. Curfew imposed in entire city.
• Kosikalan Jun 14, 2012 Communal violence sparked off  over the killing of a young man. Curfew clamped.
• Saharanpur Jun 14, 2012 Communal violence. Women targeted. Curfew clamped.
• Lucknow, Allahabad & Kanpur Aug 17, 2012 Protest demonstrations against the violence in Assam followed by communal clashes and attack on media.
• Ghaziabad Aug 13, 2012 Communal violence followed by curfew.
• Ghaziabad Sep 16, 2012 Communal violence results in death of two. Curfew.
• Faizabad Oct 24, 2012 Communal clashes over immersion of idol. Curfew.
• Faizabad Oct 26, 2012 Repeat of violence over religious procession and route for immersion of Durga idol in river. Large-scale arson; 24 shops burnt, vehicles set afire.
• Azamgarh Dec 6, 2012 Violent clash between two groups. 11 injured. Heavy police deployment.
• Pratapgarh Jun 25, 2012 Gang-rape and murder followed by communal violence
• Muzaffarnagar Jun 4, 2012 Two women and 18 men wounded in communal clashes
• Kosikalan Feb 4, 2013 Renewed communal violence; one killed
• Muzaffarnagar Feb 4, 2013 Another round of communal violence. 15 injured.
• Lucknow Jan 12, 2013 Clash between Shia and Sunni sects of Muslims over Tazia procession. Heavy stone-pelting, clashes leave four hurt.
• Pratapgarh Mar 3, 2013  Mob kills deputy superintendent of police Zia-ul-Haq after murder of a village head and his brother. DSP’s family pointedly accused powerful minister Raghuraj Pratap Singh ‘Raja Bhaiya’.
• Etawah Feb 24, 2013 Broad daylight killing of youth coming for his own wedding inside the court premises sparks off large-scale violence.

By Sharat Pradhan with Debarshi Dasgupta in Kadalpur and Panini Anand in Delhi