Tapes Indicate Bombay Police Sided With Hindus in Riots

“Let it burn,” a voice from the police control room told a street patrol as a Muslim shop went up in flames. But don’t torch Hindu property, came the order.

That and other secretly taped police dispatches are at the heart of a court battle between police and a human rights group that accused police of taking part in last month’s Hindu riots against Muslims.

At least 600 people died and 1,200 people were injured in the nine days of mob fury that shattered the cosmopolitan image of Bombay, India’s largest city and financial capital.

Authorities kept no breakdown of the ethnic identities of the victims, but Muslim newspaper editor Shahid Siddiqui said at least 80% were Muslims.

Two threads of fear ran through the orgy of violence: that Muslims were in danger just for being Muslims, and that police would do nothing to stop the rampaging Hindus calling for Muslim blood.

“The tapes show the strong communal bias of the Bombay police,” said Asghar Ali Engineer, the director of the Institute of Islamic Studies in Bombay. “This has been happening in Bombay for years, whenever there is Hindu-Muslim violence.”

A reporter for Business India magazine who said she monitored and recorded police frequencies released an unofficial transcript to other Indian journalists.

But the transcript was hardly used by Business India or other Indian publications, which commonly do not identify the players in religious violence, fearing it would inflame passions. The first major publication to refer to the tapes was the New York Times, which cited them Thursday.

One section of the transcript quotes a voice from the control room saying, “Don’t burn anything that belongs to a Maharashtrian,” a reference to the Hindus of Maharashtra state, whose capital is Bombay. “But burn everything belonging to a Miyan (Muslim).”

At another point, a patrol reported a Muslim business on fire. “Let it burn,” the control room responded.

Throughout the transcript, Muslims were referred to in vulgar terms. One frequently used expression was landgiya , a pejorative word in the Maharashtrian language referring to a circumcised man.

In one transmission, the control room demanded that officers keep milk from reaching Muslim riot victims: “Who has milk been distributed to? . . . Do you get me? Do not distribute milk to landgiya. Do you get me?”

The Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights took the transcript and petitioned the Bombay High Court to seize all the tapes recorded by the police control room from Jan. 5-17.

The group charged the police opened fire primarily on Muslim mobs, failed to protect Muslims and obstructed army and paramilitary forces sent to help quell the unrest.

On Wednesday, the court instructed police to preserve 77 tapes of radio dispatches until it rules whether the cassettes can be used as evidence in a judicial inquiry into the riots.