Title - Dasna violence may have been planned on Koran derogatory comments - The Economic Times

DASNA (UTTAR PRADESH): As riots go, the conflagration in Dasna, in Ghaziabad, was fairly typical. A few pages of the Koran with derogatory comments were mysteriously found at Adhyatmik Nagar railway station at noon on September 14, and forwarded to the nearby Rafikabad mosque and its Imam Abdul Qadir for further action. At Friday prayers, the pages were first considered for burial, but then, a group of young people decided that the insult to the holy book could not go unpunished.

By the time of the Ashar namaz (5 pm in the evening) word had spread to other Friday congregations, by 6 pm, the Masuri police station, on the arterial National Highway 24, was surrounded by angry men, incensed by the 'police's inaction', by 8 pm, six young men, mostly by-standers had been killed in police firing, buses torched in the police compound, and curfew clamped for the next four days.

While the violence in Dasna, and the toll of the dead it left behind, makes it the most serious case of communal violence in the state, it is part of a disturbing trend in Uttar Pradesh under Akhilesh Yadav's watch. The Dasna incident is one of a continuum of incidents at Pratapgarh, Bareilly, Mathura, Allahabad and Kanpur in the last three-and-a-half months. Law enforcement officials say that the Dasna violence like that in Allahabad and Kanpur appeared to be planned. "The behaviour of the crowd was not natural and spontaneous. It was very obvious that there was an element of planning. The pages were 'found' at Adhyatmik Nagar railway station at around noon, by 6 pm, our police station was surrounded and attacked," said deputy inspector-general, Meerut Range, Zaki Ahmad.

Gaffar Hafiz, who runs a small shop next to the station, was the one who brought the offending pages to the Imam's notice. He says it was given to him by three boys, only one of whom was local. "We thought Imam sahib would bury the pages," he says.

The Imam, Abdul Qadir says that while the initial intention was to bury the pages, "some young men thought it should be taken seriously." Consequences were indeed serious for Aslam Ahmad, whose son, Asif was one of the victims of the police firing, while standing on the terrace of his house, opposite the police station. "I couldn't even take my son for medical help, as all the roads were jammed," he says.