Malda Riots - Implement Rule of LAW

For the past several months, there has been a raging campaign ongoing against an increasing trend of intolerance in the country. Now, the country has always been intolerant in some respects, especially when it comes to asking for bans on something or the other, or when somebody gets aggrieved over something or the other, and is able to convince (or threaten) the Government to pass orders banning whatever it was that offended them. This is also true about religious issues, where the problems gets even more complicated. Hindus complain that Muslim issues are ignored or that there is appeasement, while Muslims complain that there is no appeasement, that their situation is as bad as the most oppressed sections of the Hindu society, and that the media and the Government only pander to the clergy of the religion.
When such a situation happens often, and in India, when there is a perception that there is too much appeasement of the Muslim community, the pendulum swings to the right and leads to a polarization of a sizable chunk of the Hindu population, and brings in to power parties who represent the Hindu community, parties such as the Shiv Sena and the BJP. At the same time, there is a widespread belief that the ‘secular’ parties, such as the Samajwadi, the JD(U), even the Congress, TMC and many others are so beholden to their apparent support within the Muslim community that they ignore any incident; which gives a chance to polarization on the other side. And the tragedy of this situation is that this support is seen to be only shallow, looking at controversial incidents rather than focusing on core issues such as lower levels of education, old style customs, and poor economic development. 

A classic case of something that seems to be happening similar is the incident at Malda in West Bengal and the reaction from parties to this situation. The whole problem is that there is no openness about what exactly happened, and this gives different sides the chance to spin this the way they want. There is no belief in what the Government or the different parties have stated, which is the bigger tragedy of the situation. I have no real version of what happened, so whatever I write below is more or less what I have read in the media.

There are 2 popular versions of what happened in Malda. One version goes that a mob, a Muslim mob, attacked a police station in Malda, caused destruction, and this mob was more than a lakh Muslims with this being a planned attack, led by politicians who wanted to reap the anger over the apparent anti-prophet comments of a politician in Uttar Pradesh. In continuation, the state did not respond, the police did not do anything while this attack was ongoing. It was a total failure of the state which did not respond because this was an attack by a muslim mob, and when a national party, the BJP, sent a delegation to find out what happened, the delegation was sent back because the state was complicit in what happened. An extension of what happened was that a part of this entire plan was to destroy the smuggling records kept in the local police station.

As opposed to this, the not clear official version was that this entire situation was criminal in nature, with no religious overtures, and the BJP was trying to fish in troubled waters. It was to ensure continued peace and quiet that the BJP delegation was not allowed to come to Malda and was sent back as soon as they come near.
The problem is, in this case, the reporting and the public image seems to be about a mass rioting by Muslims who were agitated over the apparent blasphemy against the prophet, and the secular governments and parties do not have the guts to criticize this incident. It gives a handle to the BJP, which will use this issue as much as possible to create polarization in the quest for votes. It is practically a lose lose situation for the common man, but not so far the political parties.