What began as just a demand for water boiled over into an unexpected tragedy when police opened fire to disperse a mob that had reportedly turned violent. A group of farmers had gathered in Soyla village of Tonk district in Rajasthan last week to demand that water be released from the Bisalpur dam so that they could irrigate their fields. The agitated group blocked the Jaipur-Kota highway. By the end of the day five people had died and 13 injured.

Among the victims were Hansa Devi, a pregnant woman, who was killed when a bullet ripped through the window of her house. Her husband Ram Sarup says that Hansa had come to visit her parents for a few days and had been serving water to the policemen throughout the day. Eyewitnesses like Dashrath Singh Rajawat claim the police opened fire without warning. In their defence the police say they did so as a last resort when the situation got out of hand and the agitators refused to clear the highway.

PICTURE SPEAK
WATER RIOT: Villagers protest against police firing (left), which has become Raje's latest crisis

The incident has taken its toll. Tonk District Collector Subhash Bhargava, sp Janardhan Sharma and the SHO of Soyla police station have been removed from their posts even as senior officers are tightlipped about who gave the orders to open fire. Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, who visited the area a day after the incident, has ordered a judicial inquiry into the incident by a retired high court judge and announced compensation of Rs 2 lakh for the next of kin of each victim.

This is the eighth instance of police firing on a crowd since Raje's Government took over in December 2003. Pertinently, the highest casualties have been recorded in protests related to water shortage. The problem has been simmering for quite some time. There have been agitations for the past few weeks and some government officials have been assaulted. In Tonk, the local Bisalpur Irrigation Agitation Committee has been demanding for over a month that the Bisalpur dam should also supply water to the nearby Tordi Sagar dam so that about 100 more villages could benefit from it. The Government, however, says that the area irrigated by the Bisalpur dam has been stipulated by the Asian Development Bank and it was not possible to make changes to the extent the farmers were demanding.

Expectedly, the incident has given another excuse to the political parties to take swipes at each other. State BJP chief Lalit Kishore Chaturvedi blames the Congress for provoking the farmers. State Congress President B.D. Kalla retorts, "It is the feudal mentality and failure of the administration that result in such repeated firing on unarmed crowds."

Worryingly, there are reports that the BJP's farmers' wing was also part of the protest. The party needs to find out why its grassroots leadership failed to keep the agitation under control. However, for Raje and the BJP, such incidents are happening too often for their own good.

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