Though the police were initially caught napping when the recent round of violence broke out on Oct 4, the general feeling is that the district administration acted effectively to nip the situation.

“The police defused the violence very quickly. If they hadn’t imposed the curfew strongly it could not have been controlled easily,” Muslim Central Committee leader Hamid Khan said. The BJP district in-charge minister Nagaraja Shetty has given an assurance that those guilty for the violence will be punished “without politics’’.

The Janata Dal Secular, which threw its secular ideology to the wind to ally with the BJP in January this year, has blamed the Bajrang Dal and SIMI activists for the violence. Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy who initially stated that no special inquiry would be necessary apart from the police inquiry into the violence is now reportedly under pressure from his father and party president H D Devegowda to order a state Corps of Detectives inquiry.

The prolonged curfew of the past week has had common people losing livelihood, resulting in a demand for a ban on fundamentalist groups and bandhs in the district. Peace has returned to Mangalore for the time being. People are back to their normal lives. But, simmering below the surface is a powder keg of communal emotions.