Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar are fighting for pride of place in a park in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh district.

Police had to wield lathis to disperse two groups of people who clashed over the erection of the statues of Gandhi and Ambedkar in a newly constructed park in Shekhupur Satkuna village on Friday.

A group of villagers belonging to the upper caste and OBC communities who had been planning to install a bust of Gandhi in the park was surprised to see a statue of Ambedkar put up by members of the Dalit community at the same spot on Thursday night.

The two groups attacked each other but the police intervened in time to de-escalate the situation and wielded lathis to disperse the crowd.

Senior superintendent of police of Alagarh, Sanjeev Suman, who had rushed to the village with a posse of policemen, held several rounds of meetings with both the groups.

“There is no rule to install a statue somewhere without taking formal permission from the government. We told this to the villagers who had installed a statue. They agreed to remove it after initial resistance,” Suman told reporters.

Local sources said members of the Baghel (Rajput) and Lodh (OBC) communities had taken permission from the village panchayat to place Gandhi’s bust in the park on Friday. However, the Dalits of Shekhpur Satkana and adjoining villages had already installed the Ambedkar statue a day before.

“The Gandhi followers attacked two Ambedkar supporters and left them injured. There were hundreds of people on both sides and they dispersed only when the police lathi-charged them. But there is still tension in the area,” a villager told local reporters on the condition of anonymity.

Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, was a propagator of non-violence and Ambedkar was chairman of the committee that drafted the Constitution.

“The situation is normal in the village. We have deployed forces there. We will take action against those who try to vitiate the atmosphere,” Suman said.

Panchayat chief Sharda Devi, at whose house the police have kept the statue of Ambedkar after removing it from the park, said: “The village was initially unanimous on installing the bust of Gandhi in the park. However, some anti-social elements of the neighbouring villages created trouble here.”