Taj Mahal Closed After Religious Riot

[Guest guest]

AGRA (August 31, 2007): Thousands of tourists were being evacuated

from the famed Taj Mahal city of Agra yesterday after angry mobs set

fire to shops and cars and attacked police in protest at the death of

four Muslims in a traffic accident.

 

A total curfew clamped by authorities on the city of 1.6million

people, 200 km northwest of Delhi, failed to halt the rioting in which

at least one person has been killed, more than 50 have been injured,

and millions of rupees of damage has been caused.

 

Scores of cars and trucks were destroyed in the rampage, and five

local factories, including a soft-drink bottling plant, were

ransacked, looted and set on fire.

 

Terrified tourists were ordered to stay in their hotels, and the Taj

Mahal, India's top tourist attraction, which attracts more than 20,000

visitors a day, was briefly closed and surrounded by armed police.

 

By late yesterday, the curfew had been restricted to just six suburbs

and the Taj Mahal was reopened for tourists.

 

A senior police official in the city, which remained shrouded in a

heavy pall of black smoke from fires caused by the rioting, described

the situation as " still very tense " and tourists were being provided

with armed guards as they drove along the Agra to New Delhi highway.

 

The violence erupted after a speeding truck killed four Muslims as

they were riding home on a motor cycle after observing Shabb-e-Barat,

a holy " night of salvation " festival held 15 days before the start of

Ramadan.

 

The four were relatives of a prominent local MP in the state of Uttar

Pradesh, and rampaging mobs, most of them believed to be Muslim, soon

poured onto the main Agra-New Delhi highway, blocking it and doing

battle with police and rival gangs from the majority Hindu community.

 

" The cause of this violence was that traffic was not regulated

properly. Trucks were allowed into a no-entry zone meant for

pedestrians who were going for the Shab-e-Barat procession, " state

government spokesman J.N. Chamber said yesterday.

 

On the streets leading to the Taj Mahal, police fired volleys of tear

gas in a vain attempt to disperse the mobs, but came under sustained

attack from stone and bottle-throwers.

 

Eventually, they were forced to fire live rounds of ammunition in the air.

 

Many of those injured in the rioting were police, and the child who

died is said to have been hit by a stray police bullet.

 

About 20 per cent of Agra's residents are Muslim, the rest mainly Hindu.

 

The national newspaper The Pioneer described the scenes in Agra as " an

orgy of pre-planned violence " in which Hindus were being attacked.

 

" If the accident (involving the four Muslim men) had not occurred, the

mobs would have manufactured some other reason, " it claimed in an

editorial.

 

Meanwhile, in another manifestation of communal strife last night, the

controversial chief minister of the state of Gujarat, Hindu

nationalist hardliner Narendra Modi, was at the centre of charges that

a Muslim man had been seriously bashed by security guards after he

walked in front of the chief minister's convoy of cars. Mr Modi is a

hate figure to many Muslims.

 

The 22-year-old Muslim man was reported to have been " mercilessly

thrashed " by police after disrupting the convoy of cars carrying the

chief minister.

 

SOURCE: The Australian, Sydney. Taj Mahal closed after religious riot,

by Bruce Loudon, South Asia correspondent. Additional reporting: The

Times. Copyright 2007 News Limited.

URL: http://tinyurl.com/37pu85