Clashes near masjid; encroachments razed

Municipal authorities tore down a raft of encroachments on public land abutting a decades-old mosque in central Delhi's Turkman Gate area at 1.30am on Wednesday after a brief bout of stone pelting that led to minor injuries to five policemen and the arrest of five people.

- Hemani Bhandari, Jignasa Sinha and Gargi Shukla

Thirty-two bulldozers roared into the Old Delhi neighbourhood shortly after midnight, smashing through a cloak of silence blanketing the area on a chilly and windy night. By the time their thrum had died down at 3am, a banquet hall, a diagnostics centre, a room where Haj pilgrims stayed, portions of a road, a footpath and a car park were reduced to a pile of rubble.

The action - by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), with the help of Delhi Police - removed encroachments on 36,428 sq.ft. of the Ramleela Ground. The Syed Elahi Masjid - which stands on a plot leased by the Land & Development Office to the mosque committee in 1940 - covers an area of 0.195

acres.

The demolition came hours after the Delhi high court issued notice MCD and L&DO on a petition filed by the mosque managing committee, challenging an earlier December decision by the civic body to remove the encroachments.

In November last year, the high court had given the MCD and Public Works Department (PWD) three months to clear 38,940 sq ft of encroachments at Ramlila Ground near Turkman Gate. This included the areas demolished on Wednesday morning.