- Police say deceased also include a child.
- Troops deployed on high court’s orders.
- 118 arrested as 15 police officers also injured.
KOLKATA: India resorted to deploying troops to quell deadly protests that have erupted in the state of West Bengal over legislation to change how Muslim-owned properties are managed.
Police fired tear gas at the thousands of demonstrators who gathered on Friday in the state’s Murshidabad district. Three people, including a child, were killed, police told AFP on Saturday.
“So far, 118 people have been arrested in connection with the violence,” said Jawed Shamim, a senior police official in the state, adding that at least 15 police officers were injured.
The state’s high court ordered federal troops to deploy.
The Waqf amendment bill that set off the protests was passed earlier this month after heated debate.
There are around two dozen Waqf boards across India, owning some 900,000 acres, a multi-billion-dollar property empire that makes them one of the biggest landholders alongside the railways and the defence forces.
Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Kiren Rijiju, who tabled the bill on Wednesday, said it would check corruption and mismanagement.
Amit Shah, the interior minister and a close Modi aide, said the changes will help “catch the people who lease out properties” for individual gains. “That money, which could be used to aid the development of minorities, is being stolen,” he said.
Non-Muslims, who will be included in the boards as part of the new bill, will only be involved in “administrative” matters, Shah said. However, opposition parties accuse the government of pushing “polarising politics” at the expense of India’s Muslim minority of 200 million.
According to the ruling Hindu nationalist government, it will boost transparency around land management by holding accountable powerful Waqf boards, which control properties gifted by Muslim charitable endowments.
But the opposition has called the bill a polarising “attack” on India’s Muslim minority. They accused Prime Minister Narendra Mod’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of trying to win favour with its right-wing Hindu base.
After the bill’s passage, Modi called it a “watershed moment”.
Opposition Congress Party chief Rahul Gandhi meanwhile said the bill was “aimed at Muslims today but sets a precedent to target other communities in the future”.
Modi’s decade as premier has seen him cultivate an image as an aggressive champion of the country’s majority Hindu faith.
His government revoked the constitutional autonomy of India’s Muslim-majority Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir and backed the construction of a temple on grounds where a mosque stood for centuries before it was torn down by Hindu extremists in 1992.