Gujarat: On April 28, Iftiyakh Sayid’s godown was reduced to rubble. He had used the warehouse to store agate semi-precious stones, the main commodity of trade in the decrepit coastal town of Khambhat in Gujarat. The 80 foot-by-20 foot warehouse was nearly a decade old. Days ago, the town administration suddenly ruled it was an “illegal encroachment”.
In addition to Sayid’s warehouse, the Khambhat administration bulldozed 16 other godowns on April 28, all of them owned by Muslims. “I am on the streets, I have lost everything,” said 40-year-old Sayid, who estimated that he had suffered losses amounting to Rs 9 lakh.
This was the second instance in less than two weeks of the authorities razing down property owned by Muslims in Khambhat.
The cycle of events that led to the Khambhat demolitions follows a pattern observed across the country this April. In states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, processions to celebrate Navratri and Hanuman Jayanti became communal flashpoints.
In most cases, processions organised by Hindutva groups sparked communal violence as they passed by mosques or Islamic shrines. In places where the Bharatiya Janata Party controls the state or the local administration, this violence was followed by the demolition of Muslim-owned properties tagged as “illegal encroachments” overnight.
In Khambhat, the communal conflagration broke out on Ram Navami on April 10. On April 15, the Khambhat administration brought down several kiosks in which poor Muslims operated small businesses. The kiosks lined the road that was the site of the communal violence. According to the owners of these businesses, these demolitions were conducted without any prior notice.
Twenty one Muslim men have been arrested for the April 10 clashes on the edges of Khambhat town so far. Many of them belong to families whose kiosks were destroyed on April 15.
Take 72-year-old Mohammad Abdullah Malik, who had been selling tobacco products and snacks in a kiosk for four decades. This, after Malik’s left hand was crushed in a cloth factory, leaving him with few other avenues of employment. Malik’s 21-year-old son, Tehbaz, was arrested on April 14 for alleged offences during the Ram Navami clashes in Shakarpur village, on the outskirts of Khambhat town. On April 15, Malik’s stall was knocked down.
Shakarpur’s sarpanch, or village chief, Dinesh Patel, said he approached the local administration asking for the “encroachments to be removed”. “They saw what happened live, so they agreed to my point,” said Patel, a BJP member.
Apart from the kiosks, the authorities also felled several trees. “The anti-social Muslims would sit under the trees and disturb our people,” said Patel, by way of explanation.
Patel was a key organising member of the Ram Navami procession by a local Hindutva group that calls itself the Ram Sena. Patel is close friends with the Ram Sena chief, Jaiveer Joshi, and his father, Jairaj Joshi. Patel arranged a meeting between this reporter and Jairaj Joshi, who invoked violence against Muslims several times during the conversation. Scroll. In
