Muzaffarnagar

4 days in the upper doab, between the yamuna and the ganga, on the fertile sugar bowl of north india. muzaffarnagar is a rich small town that is the jaggery capital of asia- or so they say with its enormous jaggery wholesale market, its dense city markets rotting away, its sugarcane factories, steel plants and it’s air thick with the communal riots that exploded recently. 34% are muslim by the way and the city is named after the muslim founder. also near the city is the town of deoband where the darul uloom- one of the centers of islamic studies in india was established. we drove past it on our way back from haridwar. 

we heard stories of how the riots started. how it all started of with a deception- where a muslim boy pretended to be hindu- called himself gaurav- and wooed a hindu jat girl. an encounter on the street where the boy was discovered led to murder, which led to reprisal from the other side. the district magistrate acted quickly and arrested the murderers. but a call from the higher ups got them released and then there was anger and murder on the streets as the jats streamed into muzaffarnagar. i did not feel any of the legacy of this history, as in the people that i did meet, there seemed to be an enviable ease between the muslims and the hindus- much more than on the streets of this city, for example. but then it might be my ignorance that did not allow me to see this because even while we were there www heard a story of a possible riot on in some part of the city where someone had gunned down someone else. welcome to western uttar pradesh where you can by a gun for 700 rupees.