Fire on the hills

The rising graph of violence can be attributed to purely economic reasons. Soaring unemployment and drug addiction amongst the local youth, a lacklustre tourist season and an almost non-existent apple crop this year have combined to create an inflammable situation. One which the state’s police force is ill-equipped to handle.

Says a senior police officer: “We can only do fire-fighting. Training has to be beefed up and the force has to be made more accountable to ensure proper law-enforcement.”

Apart from seasonal tourism, locals survive on their apple orchards which are becoming less productive everyyear. This year the yield was just ten per cent of last year. Many Kuluvi’s (residents of Kulu-Manali) are landless, having sold their land to non-Himachalis at tempting prices.Some of the local youth survive on leading trekking tours in the hills. Says Goyal: “Due to their interaction with foreigners, 80 per cent of the youth are on drugs. For them crime is the only answer. Laments DC, Kulu, Ashwani Kapoor: “Although there has been a mushrooming of hotels in Manali, business has been very poor. Unemployment is on the rise.”

The problem is compounded by a massive influx of people from outside the state, all grappling for a share of the fast depleting cake. Surprisingly, while the local residents of Manali constitute a mere 3,000, the floating population of people from Tibet, Nepal, Kashmir, Rajasthan, Punjab and other states is ten times that number.

Of these the largest number are Tibetans — more than 1,200. They moved here from Tibet as refugees in the late ’50s. While some set up shacks on thebustling Gompa Road in the city centre, others encroached large tracts of land on the left bank in Samahan, on the Rohtang Pass road. Their legal status remains that of refugees. They pay locals a rent of Rs 250-300 a month for their dilapidated shacks.

Tibetans are raking in huge profits from the sale of garments, handicrafts and antiques, much to the chagrin of local shop-keepers. Unlike the locals,they do not pay any taxes, including sales tax, do not display a fixed price list.

Says Gautam Nath Thakur, vice-president of the nagar panchayat: “Since they are refugees, they should do a business that does not pinch locals.” The president of the Vyapaar Mandal, Amar Singh, explains that unlike the elders,the youth of Manali are plagued by a sense of insecurity and resentment towards the Tibetan refugees. “Our own youngsters don’t have a place to do business.They feel today it is Tibetans, tomorrow it could be someone else,” he says.

Sitting in his office in a narrow back alley of the town, YeshiTseten, member of the Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputies, shakes his head regretfully. He says: “In the 11 years that I have been here, we have never had any fights with the locals, we have been living like brothers.” He admits that rivalry and hatred amongst shopkeepers and criminal elements combined to create the trouble. Tsering Wangyal, executive secretary of the Tibetan Relief Committee who rushed to Manali from Dharamsala, says that “there has to be a change in the behaviour of the Tibetans for good.”The recent riots were sparked off by a row between adolescents of the two communities, a Tibetan shopkeeper and three school students. As a reaction to the murder of one of them, 17-year-old Nek Ram, a mob of around 250 students rushed out of the school campus after the morning assembly. They systematically burnt about 133 shops on Gompa Road, most belonging to Tibetans. Fire engines were kept at bay by human chains. They were joined by lumpen elements all of whom took the opportunity to loot andplunder. The mob moved to the adjoining Model Town area, where shops belonging to Tibetans were targeted. Around 2,000 bystanders quietly watched the attack which went on for three hours.

Gompa Road, where nothing but rubble and black ash remains, looks like a war-torn zone. It is just a stone’s throw away from the fire station and 300 yards from the police station.

A well-dressed Class 12 student from the government school expresses the common sentiment amongst the local youth: “We are very happy. The Tibetans have destroyed Manali. They don’t want to make friends with us. So we have destroyed their property.”

Tibetans living in shacks near Gompa Road are huddled in fear. Many of them have been living there for the past 40 years. Shudders 40-year-old Tenzing Lamu: “Even in our wildest nightmares, we had not thought this would happen. We live in wooden shacks. If they burn them at night, what will we do?”