Word: bhiwandi
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...around the city and guarded the airport and harbor. In the worst riot areas, a nighttime curfew was in effect, but it had come too late to halt the violence by roving bands of rioters, who had killed and maimed and burned. Hardest hit were the industrial towns of Bhiwandi, Thane and Kalyan, northeast of Bombay, where thousands of huts belonging to low-income workers lay in ashes. The government hastily set up temporary camps for the homeless and rushed in emergency food supplies. By week's end Major General Laxman Rawat, the army commander for western India, declared...
...violence began in Bhiwandi (pop. 300,000, two-thirds Muslim), a textile town 32 miles northeast of Bombay with a history of Hindu-Muslim enmity: bitter fighting between Hindu and Muslim extremists in 1970 left 150 people dead. Tensions began to rise again in Bhiwandi and other Maharashtra towns earlier this year. One specific incident came in late April when Bal Thackeray, leader of a militant, right-wing Hindu organization called Shiv Sena, gave a speech in which he reportedly maligned the Islamic faith. Muslims retaliated by garlanding a portrait of Thackeray with dirty sandals, an insult to Hindus. Next...
Within hours, stones and bottles began to fly, and the rioting quickly escalated into burning and killing. In Bhiwandi, some 50 Muslim workers and their families sought refuge at the textile factory and home of Ibrahim Ansari, 50, a prosperous Muslim industrialist. A Hindu mob brandishing knives, fire bombs and cans of kerosene descended on the compound. From their barricaded living room, Ansari and his son managed to hold off the attackers with a revolver and a shotgun until police finally arrived. But by that time 20 people had been massacred...
...said Ansari afterward, pointing to a pile of ashes, a charred shirt, a sandal and a puddle of blood. "They stabbed him in the stomach with a sword and poured kerosene on him and set him on fire while he was still alive." The violence quickly spread to Bhiwandi's slum areas, where Hindus and Muslims live uncomfortably side by side: an estimated 15,000 huts were put to the torch. Soon the rioting spilled over to other industrial towns in the region and to Bombay itself...
...riot? To me it seems a strange coincidence." A Moslem speaker in parliament noted bitterly that "most of the riots break out in areas where Moslems are prosperous." Nobody was more bitter, however, than Home Minister Y.B. Chavan, a native of Maharashtra, who after a visit to Bhiwandi told of how small children had been burned alive in front of their mothers. "I have met such a mother," said Chavan, "and her face will haunt me throughout my life...