Fifteen years after van Wersch wrote this, the picture is not all that different. In Malegaon today, a town with over 84,000 powerlooms, a worker earns less than Rs 2,000 a month, although the minimum stipulated wage in this sector is Rs 3,000. Over time the town expanded to accommodate the growing number of powerlooms by throwing up foetid, overcrowded clusters of semi-pucca houses, with no electricity, no water supply, no toilet facilities, and lined by overflowing drains. It existed as part of prosperous Maharashtra’s underbelly, a state marked by some of the sharpest disparities in the country. When a group of Malegaon’s residents recently returned the cheques given to them by a visiting delegation of Congress leaders, including the state’s chief minister, it reflected widespread public alienation and resentment over the monumental neglect accorded to a town where even a decent civil hospital does not exist to date.

Against this rather dismal backdrop, another dynamic was at work, evident in one figure much bandied about recently, following last Friday’s blasts. Of Malegaon’s population of around 7 lakh, almost 75 per cent are Muslim. The town had become, in other words, a huge, communally polarised pool of cheap labour, largely unprotected by laws, largely unserviced by civic facilities. But how did Malegaon gain its strong Muslim identity? Some clues are provided in the remarkably detailed ‘Concerned Citizen’s Inquiry Report into Malegaon Riots’ of November 2001.

The town’s history and location appear to be the primary reasons for its communally polarised profile. Situated on the road linking Mumbai and Agra — now National Highway No 3 — it was once a small junction known as ‘Maliwadi’ (hamlet of gardens) and quickly gained the reputation for being a source of employment. When a local jagirdar, Naroshankar, started building a fort in the area in 1740, a project that took 20 years, a sizeable number of Muslim workers and artisans from places like Surat and northern India settled in the area. After the British capture of the Malegaon fort in 1818, Muslims from Hyderabad migrated to the region. The 1857 revolt saw many Momins from the north locate themselves here, and the pattern kept repeating itself over the years. Malegaon, with its growing Muslim presence, became something of a shelter and a source of employment for the community whenever it faced reversals. If famine in 1862 forced Muslim weavers in the Varanasi area to move to Malegaon, the political upheavals in the Hyderabad of the late 1940s and ’50s saw a similar exodus to the town. As for communal riots, which became a regular feature of the country from the ’60s onwards, they have also undoubtedly contributed to swelling the number of Muslim migrants to Malegaon.

... contd.