NEW YORK; Protests over regional, religious and linguistic grievances in different parts India were “wider in scope and more violent (1986), than in the last few years”, the New York Times reports on Sunday.
Quoting political analysts, correspondent Steven Weisman said in a dispatch from New Delhi that the ethnic violence had revived “old concerns about the difficulties of national integration”.
Another dispatch from New Delhi in the same newspaper is about the problems of poor and ill clad people in the current cold weather, and the efforts to provide shelters to these homeless have died in the cold spell sweeping the plains of northern India.
The “Times” article on ethnic protests said more than 600 people were killed in violence in the Punjab in 1986, “many of them in spectacular and gruesome massacres.
Among the recent episodes in other parts of India were several days of riots last month by agitators demanding statehood for Goa, a former Portuguese colony, it said. The army had to be called out at the height of the winter tourist season to restore order.
Before the Goa riots, the article said, Muslims in the nearby state of Karnataka reacted angrily to an Indian newspaper article that was mad (peace be upon him), Seventeen people were killed as rioting spread through the cities of Mysore, Bangalore and several smaller towns within a few days. Violence continues, meanwhile, as ethnic Gurkha in northeastern India, agitate for a separate state to be known as Gurkhaland, the “Times” said. There have been almost daily reports of new killings in demonstrations and pitched battles among workers on the area’s tea plantations.
In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, protestors against the use of Hindi as a national language have set off bombs and held mass demonstrations, leading to the detention of as many as 19.000 people.
Thousands of farmers and their organizers were arrested in December in the western state of Maharashtra while trying to block roads in agitation for higher farm prices.
Meanwhile, more than 100 people died in 1986 as tribal separatists in the remote northeastern state of Tripura clashed with ethnic Bengali plain dwellers.
The “Times” said as in many of the recent flare-ups, the police blamed “antisocial elements” and “miscreants” for fomenting the violence. But, it said, critics of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi maintain that his government was ignoring some dangerous trends behind the violence.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 30, 1987
