Bangalore has its clearly demarcated communally sensitive spots, like Shivajinagar and Frazer Town in the east, K.R. Market and JJ Nagar in the west and Gurappanapalya and Tilaknagar in the south. But what surprises most about the clashes over the weekend is that unlike previous communal clashes, they did not happen out of the blue. There was clear evidence that there could be tension on Sunday and yet the state administration reacted in a leaden manner. On January 19 evening, when people marching to a rally, organised by Congress leader C.K. Jaffer Sharief, to protest against Saddam Hussein’s execution, pulled down advertisements for a Virat Hindu rally in the Shivajinagar area, the first clashes occurred. The police then had nearly 48 hours to prepare for the three Virat Hindu rallies in east, north and south Bangalore, organised on January 21 by the Sangh Parivar. That one of the rallies would be held in a zone where the wounds of violence were fresh and there could be retaliation when another group of people march through the sensitive areas was obvious.

Bangalore’s Police Commissioner N. Achutha Rao argues that it was because the organisers of the Virat Hindu Samajothsava turned down the suggestion that the rally be cancelled in the eastern part of the city that the situation got out of hand. The police commissioner’s remarks indicate a sense of police hesitancy under the present BJP-JD(S) dispensation to nip communally fraught situations in the bud. There are now accusations that the police force did not receive a clear directive from the state government to ensure that there should be no violence. With three similar Hindu rallies in three different parts of the city and a CITU conference also to handle, the police was clearly hard-pressed. Similarly, the Sangh Parivar Virat Hindu Samajothsava rallies were held in Mangalore, Mysore and other parts of Karnataka over the past month in relative calm.

... contd.