No fury where it began

Life has returned to normal at Kanpur

The Ambedkar desecration issue may have sparked off violence and arson across Maharashtra, but the situation was near normal in Kanpur, where the incident happened. The irony became starkly visible on Thursday as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) waged a campaign to burn effigies of Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav across the state.

“Maharashtra was waiting to explode, and Kanpur only provided the spark,” said  Vivek Kumar, assistant professor at the JNU School of Social Sciences, New

Delhi told DNA. He said the recent Khairalanji Dalit killings besides the high cases of atrocities against Dalits in Maharashtra had already created a volatile situation.

The Kanpur incident has, in fact, reminded many of the caste clashes during the time when the BSP and the SP  had formed an alliance government between 1993 and 1995. Ambedkar statues were put up by hundreds of BSP men throughout the state. In a large number of cases, the statues were also used to grab land, leading to numerous incidents of caste violence.

However, no such motive has yet been identified in the Kanpur incident. Kanpur BSP secretary Anil Shukla Warsi told DNA: “It is just a case of the statue being decapped by unknown miscreants.” No one has been named in the FIR lodged at the Kakadeo police station and there have been no arrests in the case yet.