Faridabad, adjacent to the southern tip of Delhi, is suddenly all over the news.
A terror module, a “white-collar” one involving physicians trained to heal people, unearthed in the town has thrown what was once called the industrial capital of Haryana into the spotlight.
Two cars – one of them loaded with arms and ammunition – and at least two doctors have been traced to the Al-Falah University in Faridabad. The first of the arrests which happened on Sunday is linked to Monday evening’s blast barely 300 metres from the historic Red Fort in Delhi.
The tentacles of the terror network stretch from Kashmir to Delhi via Faridabad, investigators have found.
The last time that Faridabad had gained infamy was more than eight years ago.
On a late afternoon in June 2017, onboard a Delhi-Mathura Passenger, a teenager named Junaid, his siblings and a cousin were abused as “beef eaters” and “anti-nationals” before being assaulted. Junaid was stabbed to death inside a locked compartment of the moving train.
He and the other young members of his family were returning home to Khandawali in Ballabhgarh, under Faridabad district, from Delhi’s Sadar Bazar after shopping for Id which was then coming up.
The hate crime brought a once-thriving industrial township to the national headlines then. Now, it is terrorism.
India’s first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru had envisaged Faridabad as an industrial town; it did grow into one in the first three decades after Independence. A small town built by the hard toil of the industrious people settled mostly from the western part of Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province in post-Partition Pakistan.
Egged by social reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Nehru and Pratap Singh Kairon, the minister responsible for resettlement (who later became chief minister of undivided Punjab in India), put their minds together and got Mahatma Gandhi’s close aide Sudhir Ghosh to plan the town.
Freedom fighter Lakshmi Chand Jain pooled in his resources and sources to build the city, distinct from a small town that had existed for centuries from the time of Mughal emperor Jahangir.
A town on the periphery of history, mythology and lore.
Abanindranath Tagore’s classic Rajkahini begins with Suraj Kund, which is between Faridabad and Delhi. To its west lie the ruins of Tughlaqabad Fort, the capital built by Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq. To the east is the paavan (holy) Braj Bhoomi, the land of Lord Krishna, centred around Mathura-Vrindavan which stretches right till Palwal, just two stations away from Faridabad.
A shrine of the medieval Sufi saint Baba Farid located in the old town is believed to have given the town its name.
Around Old Faridabad was built the New Industrial Township, both spread around Mathura road, a part of the antique Grand Trunk road. From the 1960s onwards, the town grew. Industries came in and attracted a workforce from across the country.
The Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan aka Badshah Khan, was such a revered figure for the settlers that the government hospital and roundabout near it both were named after the freedom fighter.
The old town and the new township, divided into sectors and neighbourhoods, were neat and planned; each with a central market, plenty of open space and wide roads. It used to have just one flyover, connecting Neelam Chowk after a single-screen theatre which led to Mathura Road and the posh neighbourhoods beyond it.
Several such flyovers have come up now.
The Delhi Metro also lumbers in from the heart of the capital to the last mile post in the district, Ballabhgarh.
In Faridabad, Bata had its factory and colony for the high-ranking company officials, a club with a swimming pool. The Nandas set up Escorts, factories and hospitals. Eicher rolled out their tractors. And there were many, many more.
The assassination of Indira Gandhi and eight years later the demolition of the Babri Masjid did not break the social milieu of Faridabad to the extent they did elsewhere in the country. Curfew was imposed, movement curtailed. But the kid of violence seen in Delhi did not reach the neighbouring town.
That has changed. As evident from the terror module, as was evident with the murder of Junaid.
A lot of other things were also changing, the signs of which were missed.
Maruti Udyog Limited, pushed enthusiastically by the late Sanjay Gandhi, went to then Gurgaon, which though the district headquarter was really a gaon (village) till the arrival of the family car manufacturer.
That plant did not come to Haryana’s industrial capital. Faridabad was beginning to lose its sheen.
The late ’80s onwards, big industries in Faridabad either shut down their operations or moved to other places. At the turn of the last century the IT boom transformed Gurgaon, leaving Faridabad behind as a poor country cousin.
Like with the rest of India’s big and small towns, malls and multiplexes have appeared; single-screen theatres have fallen into disrepute in Faridabad now.
The vast tracts of land around the town spread from the main centre of the town to what was known as Pahari in our childhood, the fag end of the Aravalli that has now almost disappeared, became home to private universities.
Al-Falah University, in the spotlight since last Sunday’s arrest of a doctor, is among the several private educational institutes that have come up in Faridabad, a place that never could lose its small-town character and get the makeover of a big city.