What ails Malegaon?

 

 

MALEGAON: There are many factors that have traditionally made Malegaon a communally sensitive place. From the geographical organisation of the city—Muslims in the inner circle and Hindus in the outer—to the poor literacy, poverty and unemployment to the intra-community tensions between the natives and the migrants, Malegaon is a manipulator’s dream.

 

Add to it the struggle for economic control between Hindus and Muslims who control different parts of the industrial mainstay, the powerloom business, and you know why the air in Malegaon often becomes thick with tension.

 

Over the years, brewers of terror realised the fertility of Malegaon and soon small-scale communal riots, caches of arms and strangers, said to be visiting distant relatives, started surfacing in this city. Police frequently picked up people-locals and visitors-to interrogate for terrorist links.

 

For these reasons, communal rivalry as the cause for flare-ups is an easy conclusion. But scratch the surface, and the picture gets an economic angle, the defining angle in fact.

 

According to city insiders, the roots of the tension lie in the long-standing struggle for economic control of this city.

 

Malegaon survives on the powerloom industry. The owners and the workers are Muslims while the loom suppliers and the buyers are the Hindus. Many suspect that the riots are instigated by sections of the business community to further their narrow interests.

 

“It should be noted that even if the riot happened on a Friday or any other day, Malegaon observes a bandh on Thursday. Because Thursday is the transaction day when payments are made. Under the pretext of the riots, payments are deferred for weeks together,” says Subhash Pardeshi, a veteran local social worker.

 

According to Rajendra Bhosale, director of NAMCO Bank, the area’s socio-economic profile is the only reliable guide to understanding its problems. “You have to understand the social and economic structure of Malegaon and you will realise that this is not a communal problem but has been projected so and that has allowed some people to take advantage of it,” Bhosle said. 80 per cent of the population in Malegaon is Muslims, and they have caste divisions within them, he explains. 20 per cent are Hindus. Most houses in Malegaon have 13 -15 members. Incomes are meagre, illiteracy is very high and the population is easily influenced by religious leaders.

 

Malegaon was never a flourishing industrial centre and after the riots of October 2001, its economy completely collapsed. The powerloom businessmen ran away from declaring their businesses bankrupt. The sufferers again were the workers.

 

“There is ample time at hand. The youth loiter in clubs which they call ‘adare’. While most of them indulge in cards or carom it has recently been noticed that some are indulging in fuelling fundamentalism in these clubs.”

 

One of the reasons for the simmering Hindu-Muslim tension is the geographical structure of the city, according to Pardeshi. “The city has been developed as outer Malegaon where the Hindus reside and inner Malegaon, which is inhabited by the Muslims. Hence there is a certain tension while people move into each other’s areas in groups,” he says.

 

Malegaon is basically an economically and socially backward town with inherent tensions due to certain factors it can do nothing about. But the backwardness makes it prone to exploitation by religious fanatics and businessmen and then, terrorists. And so every now and then, Malegaon flares up.