Trilokpuri in Photos: The Making of Delhi’s Communal Tinderbox
“It’s always the other people who start riots in Trilokpuri, not us, nor our friends or neighbours.”
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Big cities are made of dreams.
And as people make a beeline to this El Dorado of opportunities and jobs, the cityscape gets cramped until everybody is in everybody else’s business and people are entwined into each other’s lives like a mesh of electric wires.
Trilokpuri is one such locality in New Delhi, where around 500 tiny quarters are cramped in 40 blocks each. The buildings stand so close to each other that it becomes a canopy of concrete blocking even the sun rays from its slithering alleys.
In a city as big as Delhi, crowded localities are a normal sight, unless you trace the big bang of it from the Turkman gate demolition drive in 1976 organised by the Congress. Homeless Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus crowded into Trilokpuri and rebuilt what they had lost, only to lose their peace again in 1984 during the anti-Sikh riots.
“This entire locality was in ruins then. We didn’t step out of the house for days,” two people hurl out their experiences as boys from the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
Out of all the 2,700 Sikhs killed in the riots, 350 were from this locality.
Delhi, for most part, remained peaceful after the dreadful event, but for the people of Trilokpuri, living in a state of strife continued when, in 2014, a small fight near a makeshift temple snowballed into communal riots leaving at least 50 people injured and resulting in a week-long curfew.
Seemingly small incidents shape-shifted to larger threats. In April 2015, a parking dispute turned into Hindu-Muslim clashes and police presence became a permanent part of the landscape.
“Badnam ho gaya ye jagah bas (the reputation has been damaged),” Madan Gopal Sharma, owner of a small shop that sells Hindu religious items, says. He’s still bitter from the dip in sales during Diwali from 2014. Sharma has been in Trilokpuri from the very beginning. His shop in Block 27 was the site of the latest clash in February this year. What started out as a clash between boys had turned into stone pelting.
For Sharma, that meant a flashback to Diwali in 2014 – poor sales before Holi because not many would dare to step outside out of fear.
“Look around, can you tell anything is wrong with this place right now? Look people are going on about their business like any other day. But everything will change at night. There’s going to be alcohol, drugs and rowdy boys,” Dharmendra says. He is a teacher who has been part of peace-making groups.
The main chowk of Pocket 27 is usually where all the brawls begin – run towards one side and you’ll reach the Hindu dominated neighbourhood, run the other way and there will be the Muslim-dominated neighbourhood.
A juice shop stands in the middle of this unfortunate crossroad. “I was standing here,” the shopkeeper says pointing at the counter, “and a brick landed right here out of nowhere. But look, now people have played Holi here. We played with them, look at the colours.”
Next to the juice shop is another shop ‘A-Z’ which was burnt down in 2014. “It got rebuilt two years later but it’s not the same,” Aamir Khan, the owner of the shop says.
Not just businesses, even real estate prices have dipped in the area.
“We have been sitting here without any customer for weeks; you can’t even sell your property at a good rate anymore. People are scared to come here,” Shakil Raza, who is a trader, says.
“It’s always other people who start this. They start it and then they are nowhere in the picture. They are the bad elements,” he adds.
If you ask the residents, they will reiterate how they have lived here for years and how they have grown up together with each other in these small alleys playing as boys, and it never mattered who was a Hindu and who was a Muslim. They will tell you, they don’t want a fight, their friends from other religious communities don’t want a fight and how they protect each other, but how it’s always the “other” people who inject this germ of communalism to every fight, every brawl, every dispute, every argument.
Some of the residents have taken it upon themselves to prevent this “other” from spreading this communal germ of thought. A peacemaking group called ‘Aman’, which has been informally existing since 1995, now has been formally recognised. They work in tandem with the Delhi Police and deal with any conflict that might have a chance of blowing up into a communal riot. Their visiting card reads ‘Hindu Muslim Sikh Isair Ekta Committee.’
An old member of this group, Riyazuddin Saify, who has “seen it all,” says, “They have forgotten the colour of blood, they have forgotten what 1984 looked like.”
He rakes up the problems of the lack of space in the area. “There’s hooch, there’s ganja, there’s smack… and where will all these boys go? There’s nowhere to play, there’s no park. All of them are illegally occupied.”
Trilokpuri cannot boast of parks that other areas have replete with jogging trails and seating arrangement. Trilokpuri’s parks are usually a tiny plot of land at frequent intervals.
Sam (name changed), a journalist, drives through a long stretch of road peppered with several “potential parks.”
“Look, someone illegally occupied this park. This one has a temple, another temple, some have mosques as well. This one’s a random structure – look at all of them, nobody is playing, there’s no space. The boys are just loafing around in the streets, and there’s no dearth of liquor and drugs.”
“Look, 2014 was an experiment. They wanted to see if it would work, and it did and now they know exactly how to ignite it. But then Sunil Vaid died,” Sam says.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sunil Vaid passed away in December 2014, a month after the riots. He was accused of instigating Hindu mobs during the rioting.
Young boys are perhaps the easiest to manipulate. The recent brawl started with a bike grazing against some pedestrians.
“My brother was on the bike, and it scraped against some people… it was a group of four-five boys, and they beat him up,” Raza, the elder brother of a boy who was involved in the fight, says. “Two days later, my brother saw one of the boys from that group, and he got his friends and beat him up. This is what happened.”
The other boy, Vikas, landed with a broken leg. He even carries the closed circuit television (CCTV) footage of the incident on his phone. Since that incident, he has become a celebrity, one his friends says, as he ushers me into the small quarter. His family is welcoming, they have had plenty of visitors over the last month.
“I don’t even know the boy. He just beat me black and blue for no reason. I was a random pick,” he says. As his mother begins to talk about the incident, a neighbourhood ‘aunty’ interrupts him, “I don’t know why they beat the boy, I don’t know maybe because he’s a Valmiki?” she violently shirks her face, as I ask her for a photograph.
“No, please no. I’m nobody, I’m not related.”
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