Word: bombay
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...smell of fire and death was almost too much to bear, and an anguished Prime Minister Indira Gandhi pulled her sari over her mouth and nostrils. She stopped in Bombay and in town after town outside the city, comforting victims and listening to pleas for protection. "This is not the time to blame each other," she said. "This is all so painful. We must live in communal harmony. We must." The statistics of violence, following more than a week of fighting between Hindus and Muslims in the western state of Maharashtra, were stark reminders of how easily India...
...Bombay, India's commercial and financial capital, looked like it was under siege as 6,000 army troops in full battle dress manned positions at key intersections in and around the city and guarded the airport and harbor. In the worst riot areas, a nighttime curfew was in effect, but it had come too late to halt the violence by roving bands of rioters, who had killed and maimed and burned. Hardest hit were the industrial towns of Bhiwandi, Thane and Kalyan, northeast of Bombay, where thousands of huts belonging to low-income workers lay in ashes. The government...
...violence began in Bhiwandi (pop. 300,000, two-thirds Muslim), a textile town 32 miles northeast of Bombay with a history of Hindu-Muslim enmity: bitter fighting between Hindu and Muslim extremists in 1970 left 150 people dead. Tensions began to rise again in Bhiwandi and other Maharashtra towns earlier this year. One specific incident came in late April when Bal Thackeray, leader of a militant, right-wing Hindu organization called Shiv Sena, gave a speech in which he reportedly maligned the Islamic faith. Muslims retaliated by garlanding a portrait of Thackeray with dirty sandals, an insult to Hindus. Next...
...fire while he was still alive." The violence quickly spread to Bhiwandi's slum areas, where Hindus and Muslims live uncomfortably side by side: an estimated 15,000 huts were put to the torch. Soon the rioting spilled over to other industrial towns in the region and to Bombay itself...
...rioters were known troublemakers; others were youths who have flocked into the city in recent years in an unsuccessful search for work. After the army had finally restored a semblance of order, new clashes broke out during a by-election in Hyderabad, some 400 miles east of Bombay. Six people were killed and 250 arrested...