An attempt by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to mobilise public on Saturday over the issue of alleged removal of a loudspeaker from a temple in Nayagaon Akbarpur, a village in Kanth town of Moradabad, failed due to prohibitory measures of the local administration. Senior BJP leaders in western Uttar Pradesh told The Hindu that for now the party may turn its focus on the “more urgent issue” of communal tension in Saharanpur.
Meanwhile, communities in the Akbarpur village continue to live under the shadow of heavy police deployment and simmering tension.
Members of the Dalit community, who take care of the Shiva temple in Akbarpur village, expressed their disappointment with the BJP for the party's “failure to keep up its promise of getting a loudspeaker sanctioned for the temple.”
There was a feeling in the Dalit community that the issue was being “unnecessarily politicised,” a fact which they argued, has led to simmering tension among Muslims and Dalits who have been living together for several decades in the village.
“We could have got the permission for the loudspeaker normally too, but when Kunwar Sarvesh Singh told us that he will help us get the permission for it, we thought that the thing will get done quite easily. We never expected that the situation will come to such a stage when this will get national attention for all the wrong reasons,” said Vijay, a member of the Dalit community.
Refusing to explicitly criticise the local MP, he said “the situation could have been handled in a much more harmonious way had the inter-communal harmony and not the party politics been the priority of people in this region".
“All we are seeing is polarisation of people outside this village. Look at what happened in Saharanpur today. Instead of protesting for our own political reasons, we need to ensure that incidents like this don't happen again,” he added.
In view of the VHP's announcement to organise a 'Jalabhishek march' in the temple in Akbarpur village and the BJP's plan to hold a protest march in Kanth town, the Moradabad administration had clamped Section 144 and deployed the police in large numbers.
The attempt of Congress to organise 'peace march' in the Kanth village was also foiled.
Several BJP MPs and MLAs were detained during the day but were released later in the evening.
