How Bhiwandi avoided riots and chose peace

The town is just coming into its own, after nearly four years of protracted trouble with electricity supply, fights with the Maharashtra State Electricity Board and, of course, slackening demand. Bhiwandi bigwigs say that around 60,000 of the five lakh looms have shut shop in these years, leaving at least three lakh people jobless. Small entrepreneurs say the export demand — the cash cow — is still sluggish and they are not able to export more than three of the seven categories for which they hold licences.

But in the past two-three months, demand had been picking up as the other loom centres, Surat and Ahmedabad, witnessed communal violence. So this time, the mob was willing to listen to reason.

Trouble started soon after Jain was shot dead and the Bajrang Dal quickly claimed him as one of their own. Hindu youngsters came out on the streets. When Congress MLA Rashid Tahir Momin, accompanied by friends, went to visit Jain’s house to offer his condolences, he was attacked by the mob. News of this spread wild and Muslim supporters came rampaging.

At Par Naka, where Jain lived, mobs of the two communities gathered to take on each other. Between them stood the usual posse of policemen, but also an unusual group of town elders who cajoled, pacified, talked and then shouted at the mobs to go back from where they came. ‘‘Every half an hour or so, groups of five-six people would come from both sides crying murder, one of them so angry that he would have chopped anyone in the way. But some of us just stood there, yelled and screamed at them and beat them back,’’ says Suresh Tawre, who saved Momin from being lynched.

If peace had broken, it would have taken months to put Bhiwandi back on rails. ‘‘At a time like this, when orders are coming, it’s suicidal for the town,’’ says M.Y. Momin, president of the All India Powerloom Development and Export Promotion Council. ‘‘After three-four years, there’s some stability. Abhi to kuch jaan aayi hai business mein.’’

Business leaders like Momin and M.I. Ansari, the president of the Bhiwandi Chamber of Commerce and Industry who survived the 1984 riots, did whatever they could by way of phone calls, personal persuasion and quelling rumours and hoped that the message — don’t mess with Bhiwandi now — would trickle down. People like Tawre and Shiv Sena sympathiser Vilas Vadke took the message to the streets.

What also made a difference was that the police didn’t let the situation get out of hand. ‘‘The police were determined that day and the next, when Jain’s funeral coincided with Bhiwandi bandh. It was a very different police from the one in 1984,’’ says Ansari, whose extended family of 30 was burnt alive then.

Workers at the looms, like the middle-aged Joggu Padmashali, are grateful. Padmashali has been in Bhiwandi for the past 10 years, spending eight to 16 hours a day at a loom so he can send money back home to his village in Andhra Pradesh. His colleagues are largely from villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, some from Orissa. They get an average of Rs 2,000 every fortnight if they work 10 hours

a day.

‘‘I don’t do anything else. I work as long as I can but if there’s no work at all, what do we do? Two-three friends of mine were in a loom that was scrapped last year. One has gone back, others are working for less money. What to do?’’ asks Padmashali.

Barely 20 per cent of the looms in Bhiwandi are operated by well-off entrepreneurs. The rest do ‘job work’, working as and when there are more orders than pending bills, employing between six and 24 workers at a time depending on the quantum of work.

‘‘If these people are hurt, the loom industry in Bhiwandi will look different. We can’t afford trouble. It was in our interest to see that there was no trouble but we could only do so much. Better sense must have prevailed,’’ says Momin.

Agrees Rashid Tahir Momin. ‘‘Our trade is in a great flux,’’ he says. There are big things like the WTO to understand and worry about. Who wants a riot in between? If looms are running, Bhiwandi is. Otherwise, we are

finished.’’