The U.P. chief minister has done well to order a judicial inquiry into the recent communal riots in Aligarh and select a former chief justice of the Allahabad High Court to head the commission. He had no choice in the matter. The demand for such a probe was a just one and failure on his part to concede it immediately would have soon exposed him to pressures which he could not have resisted. It would have further alienated not only the Muslim community, principal victim of the riots in UP in the past 18 months, but also the non-communal among the Hindus who are aghast at the revival of this monstrous problem. As it is, Mr. Ram Naresh Yadav’s cabinet colleagues are divided, with two senior ministers holding the RSS, parent organisation of the Jana Sangh constituent of the Janata, responsible for the ghastly trouble and two others strongly repudiating the charge. His continued reluctance to order to a probe could have widened the split to a point where the survival of the government itself would have become uncertain. This danger is by no means over. The divisions in the U.P. government can still sharpen if the former Jana Sanghis in the government and their sympathizers obstruct the inquiry. But that is a different issue. Aligarh is not just another town for the Muslims in India. It is the seat of the university with which so much of the Muslim sentiment and history has been associated in modern times. Apart from the forcible family planning drive, no other action of Mrs. Gandhi’s government, for instance, alienated the Muslim community throughout the country, including the south, from her and the Congress party as much as the decision to treat the university as if it was just another central institution. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that the riots in Aligarh have caused among the Muslims far greater concern than similar troubles elsewhere, though mercifully the university has managed to keep out of it – a development for which those in charge of it deserve to be warmly congratulated. Thus it follows that persons of the highest integrity must be chosen to assist the inquiry commission, that it should at once be thorough and expeditious, and that meanwhile utmost restraint must be observed by all parties, however strong their feelings in respect of what has happened.
Till the inquiry is over, it will be wrong for anyone either to blame any particular organisation for holocaust or exonerate it. But since politics is clearly in command in the country and it is unrealistic to expect political parties and factions in the ruling Janata to exercise such a restraint, the Janata’s leadership may be well advised in its local unit so that individuals who, rightly or wrongly, have come to be blamed for the riots are at least not seen to dominate it. For all that we know the charges against them may be wholly false or at least greatly exaggerated. But they are widely believed among the Muslims who need to be reassured and who will not be reassured so long as men they distrust are seen to be as influential as they are right now.