By Pervez Bari
Bhopal: The Association for Protection of Civil Rights, (APCR) has alleged complicity of the police and the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh in the recent communal tensions in the state.
It may be mentioned here that in Ujjain, Chandankhedi (Indore) and Dorana (Mandsaur), the Hindutva brigade while engineering communal mob attack on Muslim majority localities, had created unprecedented scenes in late December 2020 during the Ram temple donation drive.
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Addressing a joint press conference here on Thursday Adv. Ehtesham Hashmi and Adv. Shoeb Inamdar (National Assistant Coordinator, APCR), informed that a fact-finding team of APCR spoke extensively to the people of these violence-hit places. “We spoke to eyewitnesses, victims and police officials in order to understand how the violence unfolded,” they said.
Apart from these, the APCR fact-finding team compromised Adv. Mukesh Kishore (Member CIP-ML), Kashif Ahmad Faraz (Journalist), Adv. Jawalant Singh Chauhan, M Huzaifa (Student Activist, AMU), and Syed Ali (Social Worker). the team visited Madhya Pradesh after the engineered communal mob attack.
Adv. Ehtesham Hashmi said that after speaking to people and visiting violence-affected places, it was very clear that this “violence was not spontaneous but was pre-planned and very carefully orchestrated by the right-wing hooligans of BJP.”
Also Read | MP: Hindu mob attacks mosque amid clashes during Ram Mandir collection drive
Adv. Hashmi said: “A similar pattern of violence was observed that was orchestrated in every place that we visited. On 25th of December 2020, a religious rally was organized from five different places in Ujjain, subsequently, all five gatherings conversed in Begum Bagh locality, where predominantly residents are from minority community (Muslims). The gathering started chanting derogatory slogans for the residents. This led to skirmishes between the gathered mob and residents.”
“In reply to the abuses hurled targeting women of the locality, reportedly one woman threw a stone at the abusive mob. Apparently, it turned out into stone pelting mayhem. The mob taking advantage of the situation started beating men from the local population and damaged property in the local vicinity. This whole incident happened in the presence of the local police,” he added.
He claimed that in response to the incident, police filed FIRs against 40 residents from the local area who were instigated into this conflict.
“One-sided action of the police was grossly irrational and arbitrary,” he said
Adv. Shoeb Inamdar while talking to newspersons said the rallies were forcefully taken to Muslim areas, where extremely derogatory communal and provocative slogans were raised. This was followed by large scale violence, wherein particularly mosques and Muslim properties were targeted by the mob. In many places, they even destroyed houses and vehicles, live-stocks owned by Muslims, he alleged.
“Many eyewitnesses confirmed police inactiveness and insensitiveness towards their duty to protect innocent citizen’s life and property. Complete lawlessness existed there since morning to evening that day,” he said.