AHMEDABAD/NEW DELHI, 5 May — The news that "supercop" K.P.S. Gill has been appointed security adviser to Chief Minister Narendra Modi to bring the situation in the western state of Gujarat under control didn’t prevent mobs from going on the warpath yesterday in Kapadvanj town, nearly 75 km from the principal city of Ahmedabad.
Two groups hurled stones at one another, causing police to lob tear gas shells. Varaval, a village in Jamnagar district in the Saurashtra region, had also grown tense Friday with Hindu right-wing leaders alleging a temple was desecrated. Dilip Trivedi, state general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), alleged a temple had been desecrated to foment sectarianism.
But a senior Jamnagar police officer said the man responsible for the incident was mentally challenged. Tension simmered in the railway station of Mehsana town, about 75 km from Ahmedabad, following a fight between two tea sellers on the railway platform. Police said one of them stabbed the other to death.
Incidents of violence were also reported from Veraval in Junagadh district, Modasa in Sabarkantha and Rangpur in Baroda. In Sabarkantha, miscreants threw a crude bomb in the Dhobi ni Dhall neighborhood of Modasa town, about 70 km from Ahmedabad. The district was tense with the rumor that a dismembered body had been found. However, a note confirmed that it was a case of suicide. About 10 houses were torched in Devhat village in the Rangpur sub-district of Baroda Friday after two communities fought over a feast following allegations that it had served beef.
In Baroda city, police had to lob tear gas shells to disperse mobs clashing near the Kasamala graveyard in Karelibaugh. Gujarat has been in the grip of sectarian violence since Feb. 27 when 58 passengers were killed in a train-torching in Godhra town. Since then, over 900 people died in the ensuing riots.
Meanwhile, Gill, yesterday met top officials in Gujarat ahead of accepting the job to tone up the police force of the western state. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who is accused by rights groups and various international forums of inept handling of the communal violence, said he would be glad to have the towering Sikh police official as his security adviser.
"It is good to have an experienced person such as Gill as my security adviser. Gill had very effectively tackled the Punjab terrorism problem," Modi, a Hindu hard-liner said in Ahmedabad.
"Also the National Human Rights Commission has made a suggestion that our police force should be made more professional. Gill would help us in this task," he said of the autonomous watchdog which has flayed Modi’s government for not stemming the blood bath. Gill, who earned the sobriquet "supercop" not only because of his successes in Punjab but for his role in battling tribal insurgencies in the northeastern state of Assam where he did a stint as police chief in the mid-1990s, was unavailable for comment.
The former Punjab police chief was named by the Home Ministry as Modi’s adviser, which critics of the government said amounted to interference by the central government in the affairs of the state administration. Both are governed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is under great pressure from opposition parties to boot out Modi as chief minister of Gujarat where most of the riot victims were Muslims.
