Muzaffarnagar riots: BJP MLAs to surrender, corner Akhilesh

Yesterday the Samajwadi Party government and BJP were eyeball to eyeball. For once, chief minister Akhilesh Yadav was promising to act. He had warrants issued against some political leaders accused in abetting the communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, and in particular targeted the BJP for vitiating the atmosphere.  However, the BJP did not cower and Uma Bharti gave party the vigour to take on might of the ruling establishment. The defiance forced Yadav to blink first. The police did not arrest any of the BJP MLAs against whom warrants had been issued. Three out of the four accused MLAs were present in the assembly and were later escorted out by Bharti, from where they went wherever they wanted to go, unhindered by the police. However, the BJP is changing its strategy since it does not want to send a message that its MLAs were either on the run or defying rule of law. Party sources said Sangeet Som, the youngest BJP MLA who has been charged with uploading a controversial video on Facebook to ignite communal riots, will surrender to the police in the next two days. Kunwar Bhartendu Singh and Suresh Rana, who have been charged of making provocative speeches at Mahapanchayat, could also surrender. Bharti confirmed to Firstpost that she has asked them to “volunteer their arrest”. “Yesterday also, the MLAs were ready for arrest. They have committed no wrong and as such there was no reason why they should fear arrest. The only problem is that Samajwadi government has been targeting a particular community and a particular party, and is trying to implicate them in false cases," she said. [caption id=“attachment_1120867” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Uma Bharti with BJP MLAs accused of being involved in the Muzaffarnagar riots. PTI[/caption] “It is not acceptable to me that when the person (Azam Khan) who sits next to him (Akhilesh Yadav) too has come under shadow of suspicion, he is not even being investigated, MLAs belonging to my party should be booked under NSA on a most flimsy pretext. I too was volunteering my arrest, so were my other 48 MLAs. A clueless government should be ready to face the consequences for its misadventure”, Bharti said. Now that she has won first round, Bharti has other ideas. She will be staying in Lucknow for the next few days to be at the helm of moves that she and her party will decide. Asking MLA Sangeet Som and others to surrender before a court, is one such move and this move is guided by two ideas. Firstly that there is no substantive evidence against any of these MLAs to sustain the cases that have been registered against them. Sharing a video on Facebook and clicking on the mouse to register a ’like’ is not a crime that could merit slapping sections of the National Security Act against him. Som was one among around 240 persons who shared the fake video on Facebook. It is also debatable whether a video on social media sparked off a communal riot of this intensity in an area where computer literacy is still low. With the exception of Kunwar Bhartendu Singh, all the other BJP MLAs who have warrants against them have been openly attending various social and political meets. The BJP is hoping that that even if the MLAs surrender they will soon get judicial relief. Secondly, this move will give the BJP a moral high ground to seek the arrest of Samajwadi Party, Congress and BSP leaders. Of the arrest warrants issued yesterday, three were against BJP leaders. There were three against BSP leaders: MP Kadir Rana  and MLAs Maulana Jameel Ahmed and Noor Saleem Rana. A former Congress minister Saeed-uz-Zaman also had a warrant issued against him, but no Samajwadi Party leader has had a warrant against them. While the Chief Minister vowed strict action against anyone involved in the riots, irrespective of their position and leanings, his uncle Ramgopal Yadav was more candid and said that they had to weigh various aspects and ensure that the peace continues to prevail. The three BJP MLAs surrendering would put pressure on the Chief Minister to either make other accused MLAs surrender or force their arrest. How the arrest of these community leaders wiill impact the fragile social truce that prevails is anybody’s guess. The problem that lay at the root of communal clashes that took 48 lives and rendered around 42, 000 homeless was the error in releasing some of the accused who were allegedly involved in murdering the two youths in Kawal village on 27 August. The filing of another wrongful FIR in which some innocent persons and senior citizens were accused made things worse. That decision by the police, taken after a new District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police were posted, instantly escalated tension. Another major error by the local administration was allowing a Mahapanchayat to take place on 7 September. Apart from the political pressure from the BJP, another problem the Samajwadi Party is facing now is one of a lack of credibility among the state’s officers. If the anguish of middle level police officers, stung by hidden cameras, wasn’t enough, Additional Director General (law and order) Arun Kumar has written to the state government asking to be relieved of his duties so that he could work on deputation with the union government. Kumar, considered to be an upright officer, is said to be upset for not getting a free hand to do his work and facing constant political interference. The decision by the senior police official, who was sent to Muzaffarnagar to probe the riots and bring the guilty to book, is seen as a severe embarrassment to the state government. A section of the state bureaucracy, in the IAS and IPS, were already peeved over the manner in which Durga Shakti Nagpal was suspended on the personal whim of a local SP leader and the Noida DM, who tried to protect her, was shunted out without a posting. Kumar’s visible disinterest to serve under the SP government has further brought their grievances to the fore. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s options are limited and time is running out for him. Ironically, he and his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, who project themselves as secular messiahs, look set to go for the next parliamentary elections with the taint of a communal riot on their sleeve.