The violence in Dhule is not just about the three brutal communal riots (2008, ’10 and ’13) from the last 6-7 years. Behind the facade is the growing animosity fuelled by the political classes and their accomplices in the illegal drugs, oil pilferage and other mafias. Unemployment is rampant, and a ghettoisation that fuels violence and a separateness of the mind is a lived reality. In 2008, property worth crores was gutted, but little justice came by way of the townspeople. This time around, vociferous demands for a judicial inquiry (made nationally) forced the state into action. But this is not a problem of Dhule alone. Dhule, Maharashtra and India also have to deal with the fact that behind these selective killings is the consistent allegations of bias in the functioning of our police. It’s another reality we seek to deny. After the 1992-93 Bombay riots, ACP, state intelligence, V.N. Deshmukh had told the Srikrishna Commission of the dangerous levels of communalisation in the Bombay and Maharashtra police. Other senior policemen—be it ex-BSF chief K.F. Rustomjee, former Punjab DIG Padma Rosha or Vibhuti Narain Rai of the UP cadre—have all been upfront in their concerns. Yet nothing in our recruitment procedures equips the man or woman joining the force with the requisite constitutional values of equality and non-discrimination and screens them for caste or communal bias. Communal bias, especially the institutionalised kind, remains the dark underbelly of our system, a cancer eating away which we are loath to confront.