Mumbai: The Maharashtra government had ordered a partial shutdown of the telephone system in the city on Monday, when Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray was arrested.

This has been confirmed by sources in the local telephone provider, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL).

"These lines were clogged because there was too much traffic. There was an overload on the systems," Union Communications Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, under whose ministry the MTNL functions, had told reporters in New Delhi when asked about the shutdown.

Official statements from MTNL had also claimed that the disruptions were caused by a systems overload. MTNL has nearly 2.3 million subscribers in Mumbai.

A similar shutdown had been ordered on March 12, 1993, when the serial bomb blasts rocked the city. At that time, the entire telephone network was shut down within an hour of the first explosion at the Bombay Stock Exchange. Officials had said that this had been done to stop rumour mongering in the city.

Sources in the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) told IANS that telephone exchanges in areas like Dadar, Mazgaon, Parel, Thane and other Shiv Sena strongholds had been shut down on Tuesday on the explicit advice of the state home department.

The affected areas included the state Assembly, where the monsoon session was in progress. Sena legislators had ransacked the house on hearing of Thackeray's arrest.

The telephone system functioned normally in areas that are not considered to be strongholds of the Sena.

The Congress-led Maharashtra government feared widespread unrest in the city after Thackeray was arrested. He had been charged with inciting communal hatred during the Mumbai riots of 1992 through his editorials in the party mouthpiece "Samna." Thackeray was released after a 45-minute court hearing, the judge ruling that the case was time-barred.

"These things (shutdown of lines) are done at the local exchange level," said a well-placed source in the MTNL.

MTNL also shut down lines connecting mobile and pager networks. Attempts to dial a mobile phone from a landline prompted a recorded response: "This network is temporarily out of service." Representatives of Orange and BPL Mobile, the two main cellular operators in Mumbai, however, refused to comment.

Members of Parliament belonging to the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party had demanded an inquiry into the shutdown. "The suspension of phone lines was done with the connivance of the Congress and the local police," Sena and BJP members said in a representation to Paswan.

"The phones were shut down deliberately so that people could not get information of Balasaheb's (Thackeray's) arrest," Narayan Rane, Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, told the media shortly after Thackeray was released.

"When the telephone network is overloaded, a pre-recorded message warns callers to try again later. This time the phones simply went dead," other Shiv Sena leaders said.

Cable operators privately admit that they were ordered by local police officers to shut down their systems as some private television channels were relaying a live telecast of Thackeray's arrest.

India Abroad News Service

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