Team Clarion
SURAT — The police in Gujarat’s Surat arrested 33 people after breaking gates, locks and windows of Muslim houses following Sunday’s communal clashes over alleged stone pelting at Ganesh pandals in Syedpura locality of the city.
On Monday, Gujarat police also posted a video of the crackdown showing police officials in mufti breaking the gates and locks possibly to arrest someone. In the video, state Home Minister Harsh Sanghvi is also shown vowing to take strict action and arrest the people over stone pelting allegations before sunrise. The video shows those arrested could not walk properly suggesting that they were subjected to violence in the police custody.
Talking to Times Now Navbharat, a Muslim woman said as they were making preparations to have food, suddenly the police came and started hitting the window of her home with lathis. “The glasses of the window were broken. My one-year-old girl was playing near the window. When I came to take my child, they shouted asking me to open the door else they would break it,” she said. Two men were arrested from her house.
The woman said that the police also arrested their guests during the raid.
When asked why the gates were locked, a woman said: “Hindu groups were raising slogans on the nearby road. They were abusing Muslims. People will do something for their safety. All roads were full of those Hindu protesters. They were calling for doing something to Muslims”.
“As the sloganeering was going on, we were scared and locked our houses so that nothing untoward happens. We did not know the policemen would come. We were worried that those sloganeering people would come to our house,” she said.
On the stone pelting incident, the woman said that the incident happened far away from her house. None of the people from her house threw stones. They have no role in that. There is no evidence that the men from their families pelted stones. “There is no proof that our men pelted stones,” asserted a woman.
The woman said that male members of her family were taken away after breaking into their house. And they were also beaten up, she said.
Another woman alleged that she and her mother were misbehaved and pushed around when they had gone to the police station to meet the arrested male members of the family.
Violence broke out after some children had allegedly thrown stones at the Ganesh Pandal. Surat Police Commissioner Anupam Gehlot said that a group of children pelted stones at a pandal, after which clashes broke out in the area.
