Muzaffar Nagar
My Muzaffarnagar on the boil
Police personnel and para military jawans keep vigil during the curfew in the riot-hit Muzaffarnagar.
I wanted my small town to become well-known on the map. I had often dreamt of this and believed that someday, either I or someone else, would do something to make Muzaffarnagar famous. Instead, two weeks ago, it was politics that reared its ugly head to do so.
Once better known as the ‘sugar bowl of India’, farmers and small industrialists in Muzaffarnagar have been producing and supplying sugar for over six decades. On entering the vicinity of the town, sprawling fields of sugarcane can be seen everywhere. Perhaps, the only hindrance to this beautiful view would have been the sugar mills that use these canes to make the sugar that we use daily. The town can also boast about the largest jaggery market in Asia. This same sweetness also stirred in every resident of the town.
Over the years, I have been in the city on and off, and have several fond memories of the place from my childhood. The colony where we stayed was a mixed bag of people from different religions and backgrounds. There was a temple in the colony and a mosque nearby where prayers were held every morning. The beautiful part in this was that the temple bells and bhajans would begin only after the prayers in the mosque would get over. The same thing was followed during the evening prayers. I remember having to travel to school in a rickshaw with my friends. We were a group of naughty, shy children, and I don’t remember if we ever discussed what our religion was. We were just friends praying in different places. There was always a hurry to get back home from Eidgaah just to see my friends waiting for the ‘eidi’ and then run to a nearby local fair to enjoy the Eid mela. The jalebis from the shop just after the cricket match on a weekend were never high-calorie food and we fought over the last piece left in the plate.
Today, the pictures that I see being shared online or on television are of those streets where we used to play, run and hide from Holi colors. The streets that were filled with burnt crackers post Diwali, are now filled with broken stones and bricks. So the question is, what happened in this town that it started burning all of a sudden? What fueled the violence that killed about 50 people? Was it a simple case of eve-teasing that was converted into communal violence? Apparently nobody can be held responsible for the same because ‘somebody’ gave a hate speech to incite the mob, ‘somebody’ posted fake videos on social media and ‘somebody’ fired the first bullet. Well, nobody has ever been able to track this ‘somebody’. Adding fuel to the anger, the so-called ‘responsible’ local media also took snapshots from the video and printed it on front pages. The conditions were allowed to become worse even after some small clashes had taken place, until the riots broke out in the whole region. I noticed with concern a statement from a close friend that stereotyped all Muslims, calling them ‘terrorists’ on social media. Have we allowed politics to affect our age-old relations as well?
Meanwhile, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh promised to pay money to the kin of the dead and other political parties blamed each other while the people were stuck in the curfew with decreasing rations and medicines. We talk about world peace and here, we are unable to maintain it even within our own country. I can only hope that my small town of Muzaffarnagar finds its peace, that someday, people will become more sensitive towards these issues and try to make society a peaceful place to live in for generations to come.
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