National

Riot victims return home

By Manas Dasgupta

VADODARA June 3. More than 95 per cent of the riot-hit people in various relief camps in Vadodara have returned home, thanks to a proactive role played by the police. Elsewhere in the district, more than 90 per cent of the riot victims returned home, allowing the authorities to close down all but two relief camps.

``If we were prepared to sanction alternate sites, the problem could have been resolved in a few hours, but the Government was keen that life remained as it was before the riots and the Hindus and Muslims lived together peacefully as they were earlier,'' the District Collector, Bhagyesh Jha, said.

Vadodara, considered to be the cultural capital of Gujarat, is the second most communally-sensitive city after Ahmedabad, but unlike in the previous occasions, the scale of violence this time was much less than in the commercial capital of the State. While more than 450 people were killed and several thousand houses and shops were set afire in Ahmedabad where the disturbances continued for over two and a half months and is still simmering, the loss of lives in Vadodara was 47 and the houses and shops affected were less than 200.

The City Police Commissioner, Deen Dayal Tuteja, has fallen in the bad books of the ruling BJP not because of inefficiency in handling the riot situation, but because he did not allow the mobs to run amuck on the crucial Gujarat bandh day on February 28 when about 150 people were burnt alive in Ahmedabad in a single day. He was also among the very few police officers who went ahead with preventive detention of anti-social elements and called for seizure of private arms.

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