DSP Mehra Lynched.

Remember?

Police Superintendent Anil Sinha, as he then was, who is now CBI Chief, had waded through a sea of humanity on the narrow Nathnagar Bazar road on which DSP Mehra was reported not just beleaguered but feared fatally hurt by the agitating weavers whose electricity had been disconnected for the non-payment of enormous arrears that then exceeded Rr. 2 Crores.

When the SP reached there, he and the policemen that accompanied him froze , finding the place littered with stones, evidencing its fierce pelting, along and around  a burning police jeep that Mehra drove. As if that was not enough, a burnt, not just charred, body lay aside that was impossible to identify by human vision . But steel of the burnt belt had a tell tale picture to reveal.

It then transpired to the shock of the armed policemen , ready to burst  out with their bouts of ire, it transpired that the DSP was lynched in a roadside hardware engineering outlet named Hind Engineering, which dealt in agricultural implements, especially sharp cutting instruments that came handy for the marauders to be used as conventional weapons to lunch the DSP and then drag him to the police jeep that had already been set ablaze. Rest of the story can best be imagined than contained in words.

Simple story telling is not my cup of tea. The relevant part begins hereafter, involving media, official , public and other machinations.

Let me state for reference sake that hardly a couple of years or some months later, communal riots of 1989 broke out. My reason of telling this is to strike an allusion herein, that the said kind of communal rage could have seared the silk city at  this very point in time, but for the reason that Bhagalpur then had an Anil Sinha as its Police Superintendent, rather than a K.S.Dwivedi aided by District Magistrate Arun Jha . Their ineptness drove the city to a worst ever communal holocaust, equally contributed by the media that is ever ready to fish in the troubled waters.  

Question is what Anil Sinha did that prevented; and what Dwivedi-Arun Jha combine did to trigger the riots. And what was the role of media in both the above cases. 

The present series addresses these aspects.

(More to follow)