When communal violence broke out in an area of five kilometre radius in the east of Bangalore on Sunday evening, most of the new-age city remained blissfully unaware. An 8 am to 6 pm power cut in a major part of the city meant that few had tuned into the live images of Bangalore’s first televised communal clashes.

Though no stranger to rioting, Bangalore carries few open wounds of communal violence, wounds that are sensitive to political manoeuvring. It is, of course, the ethnic clashes over language that still hurts — the 1991 riots between Kannadigas and Tamils over the sharing of the Cauvery river water that left 20 dead. Then there was the mindless violence following the kidnapping of Kannada film star Dr Rajkumar in 2000, and following his death in April 2006.

Even Bangalore’s worst communal riots did not come immediately after Babri Masjid demolition of December 1992. It came almost a year later, in October 1993, in the form of a dispute over a Congress move to introduce Urdu news broadcasts, which left 17 people dead in two days of violence. There have been dozens of other incidents in the past two decades, but most of them will really go down as minor skirmishes compared to the Cauvery riots or the Urdu news riots. In 1997, the demolition of a stone structure in a mosque in Jayanagar in south Bangalore led to communal violence in the sensitive regions across the city, leaving four dead. In 2002, a Hindu-Muslim marriage resulted in a brief spell of violence. In 2003, following the India-Pakistan World Cup cricket game in Bangalore, violence was reported in some sensitive areas as jubilant fans celebrating an Indian victory drove around taunting people in Muslim-dominated areas. Most recently, in April 2005, violence broke out in the JJ Nagar area after a boy found urinating near a place of worship was beaten up.

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