Adhauli village, Bulandshahr:
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, people can connect the dots and see
the pattern emerging across hate crimes in Uttar Pradesh (UP).
Dinesh
Rajput, in Bulandshahr’s Adhauli village, was one of the first to call
the police when a carcass, purportedly of a cow, was found near a pond.
In a few hours, an angry mob–including people from outside the village,
as villagers later said–had unleashed violence and vandalised a mosque.
The issue would have been resolved in a less-violent way, if not for the
“outsiders”, Rajput told FactChecker, “They egged the villagers on.”It
starts with a minor incident, controversial enough to draw the crowds,
but the situation remains on slow burn. Until people from outside the
village appear, fueling passions and inciting the mob until it commits a
crime that destroys lives, relationships and neighbourly coexistence,
for a long time to come.
“
Mahual kharab karna chahate the wo log,”
Dinesh Rajput of Adhauli village of Bulandshahr district in western UP,
where a mosque was vandalised on August 25, 2017, said, meaning “they
wanted to vitiate the atmosphere”.
After the crime, “they”
disappear as quickly as they had arrived, often before the police reach
the scene. Unable to pin the blame on anyone, the police start rounding
up people at random.
Saddam (who shared only one name) of
Purbaliyan village in Muzaffarnagar in western UP, where a dispute over a
cricket match resulted in violence, narrated just such a series of
events to explain how a riot was flamed and a hate crime committed; as
did the neighbours of Mohammad Younus, who was shot dead in Naseerpur
village of Mau district in south-eastern UP on June 26, 2017, where
police investigations showed that the accused were local criminals
trying to stoke communal tensions to distract the police from an ongoing
investigation.
In Bulandshahr’s Soi village, where an elderly
Muslim man was lynched, allegedly by a mob of Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV)
activists, locals said the activists had intervened in a dispute between
two families over the elopement of an interfaith couple. The police,
initially, had
dithered over confirming the link to the HYV.
In
Sonda Habibpur village of the same district, the police are yet to
arrest the main accused in a case of violence against a Dalit man, after
his son eloped with a Muslim girl from the village. The victim’s family
alleged that the police were going slow because the accused had links
with local leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is in
power in the state and at the Centre.
UP has reported the largest number of hate crimes since 2009, as per
Hate Crime Watch,
a database of religious identity-based hate crimes across India from
2009 to 2018. In our reporting from the site of many of these crimes,
witnesses and victims veered towards a consensus–there is a pattern to
these incidents, which is nearly formulaic in its reiteration.
For
many, the link became clear after the December 4, 2018, violence in
Bulandshahr, when two people–including a policeman–were killed during a
violent demonstration by a mob protesting against the alleged slaughter
of cows. “The way the carcasses appeared, the way a mob gathered and
indulged in violence. This was exactly how it happened here as well,”
Rajput of Adhauli said.
S R Darapuri, a former Indian Police
Service officer who retired as an inspector general of the UP police,
agreed, pointing to a “careful strategy” behind these hate crimes.
“The
plan now seems to be to communalise these small, seemingly trivial, and
often even personal disputes so that both communities get mobilised,”
said Darapuri.. “The police, then, quickly steps in and imposes harsh
charges on the Muslim community.”
Such a strategy is important
to those among Hindu right-wing groups that want to trigger communal
riots. “Their efforts to trigger major communal riots in UP have failed,
largely because the Muslim community has not responded to
provocations,” said Darapuri.
This is the second story in our series reporting from the site of 13 recent hate crimes in Uttar Pradesh. Read the first story
here.
The patternEarly on the morning of August 25, 2017, a carcass, purportedly of a cow, was found in a pond just outside Adhauli village.
“We
immediately called the police because we didn’t want any trouble,” said
Arman Khan, whose uncle carries out commercial fishing in the pond.
But, before the police could come, a crowd had converged at the pond.
The villagers suspected them of being “Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena-
wale”–Hindu right-wing activists–from neighbouring villages.
Villagers
such as Dinesh Rajput, who was the first to call the police, kept a
tense watch–the village has always been communally sensitive, the local
police told
FactChecker during our field visit in
December 2018. The crowd started chanting slogans, insinuating that
Muslims from the village were responsible for slaughtering the cow whose
carcass had been found.
After a couple of hours, the police
decided to leave and file a First Information Report (FIR). Rajput said
he was afraid that things would spiral out of control, and tried to
prevent the police from leaving: “I told them they must stay in the
village or else the situation might get worse.”
Shortly after
the police left, Rajput’s fears came true. The mob in the village
square, now in the hundreds, marched to the narrow lane where most
Muslims live, and started shouting slogans. Locals later said the
slogans were largely around “
Bharat mata” and “
gau mata”.
As the anger built up, the mob reached Jama Masjid, the village mosque.
A few in the crowd decided to break into the mosque, and the mob
followed, armed with sticks and stones. Within minutes, the mosque had
been vandalised, its doors broken and furniture upturned, Khan said.
Before the police could return, Rajput told
FactChecker,
the people from outside the village had left. “Most of us could not
identify them properly because they were not locals,” he said, “So the
police started picking us [villagers] up.”
Rajput said the issue
would have been resolved in a less violent manner were it not for the
“outsiders”. “People here know their limits,” he said, “We fight but we
back off soon enough–it has never reached such a state. Those activists
egged the villagers on.”
Rewind. Repeat.A
year before this, on July 30, 2016, a near-identical sequence of events
had played out more than 150 km away, in Muzaffarnagar’s Kadhli
village.
This is the story we pieced together from our visit.
Around 8.30 a.m., some villagers had started suspecting that a calf was
being slaughtered in the home of cattle-trader and daily-wager Zeeshan
(who was referred to by only one name, even in the FIR, and has since
left the village). Some told
FactChecker they had seen a
calf being taken into Zeeshan’s house. However, one neighbour who did
not wish to be named, said a Hindu man had sold Zeeshan the calf the
previous night to entrap him. The neighbour alleged that the same man,
later, tipped other villagers off about the slaughter.
Shortly
after, a crowd had gathered, a trickle turning into a stream. “In no
time, there were around 500 people there,” Ravi Kumar, a resident of the
village, told
FactChecker while pointing to a narrow lane outside Zeeshan’s house, less than 20 feet wide.
Kumar,
an advocate, was getting ready to leave for work that day, he said,
when he noticed the crowd. There was one thing about the crowd that
disturbed him and led him to make a call to the police: “Most of the
crowd were from the neighbouring Mandwandi village. Some of them were
with the Bajrang Dal and other
gau rakshak dals [cow protection groups].”
Before
the police could come, the swelling crowd had attacked Zeeshan’s house
and assaulted his wife Shehnaz and children. “They were beaten badly; we
could see even the children bleeding,” a neighbour said, not wishing to
be named. Scared, Zeeshan’s family fled the scene, only to return a
week after the incident to find their house destroyed and their cattle
stolen.
“The situation would not have escalated so much if not
for those outsiders,” said Kumar, pointing out that the family had been
living there for decades, despite whispers that they slaughtered the odd
calf now and then, sold to them by villagers who had no use for it any
more.
Until that violent episode, Kadhli had had an impeccable
record for communal harmony. Around 40% of its 1,500-odd residents are
Muslim. “In fact, our longest-serving
pradhan was a Muslim man.
He was loved and respected by all; even today, the village remembers
him,” another villager added, also preferring to remain anonymous.
Life
has gone back to usual for many Muslim families in Kadhli. Sabila
Begum, who lives with her daughters in the house opposite the one where
Zeeshan’s family lived, said that to her, the village remained safe. “No
matter what happens outside in the world, nothing happens here. The
Hindus and Muslims have always lived in peace,” she said.
The
house where Zeeshan lived, in Kadhli village of Muzaffarnagar district
in western Uttar Pradesh, is now vacant, having been sold to another
Muslim family. This wall was knocked down by an angry mob, which
gathered there on July 30, 2016, on the suspicion that the family was
slaughtering a calf. Villagers said the new owners had rebuilt the wall.
Nevertheless,
Begum did remember the day the mob attacked her neighbour’s house.
“Before we could do anything, the family had fled,” she said. “While
they were being beaten up,” a neighbour interjected.
What happened next is another common strand that ties together the hate crimes we examined.
Partisan policingWhen
the police came to Kadhli, they saw Zeeshan’s house ransacked from the
inside and its outer wall broken down. The first thing they did,
however, was to register a First Information Report (FIR) against
Zeeshan, his wife and a few other members of his family for cow
slaughter, local police records, reviewed by
FactChecker, show.
The
station diary of the local police showed that no complaint was
registered about the family having been assaulted, the house vandalised
or the cattle stolen–these did not find mention in the investigations at
all. Zeeshan, Shehnaz and their nephews Parvez and Saddam were booked
under Sections 3, 5 and 8 of the UP Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act of
1955.
Zeeshan, Parvez and Saddam spent close to nine months in jail, though Shehnaz was bailed out.
Officials at the Khatauli police station, under whose jurisdiction Kadhli falls, told
FactChecker there
had been no violence at Zeeshan’s house or against his family. Instead,
they said with finality, Zeeshan had been booked for cow slaughter
previously too.
Turning the known into unknownAcross
the UP hate crime spots that we visited, police action, or inaction,
took different forms. In two of the hate crimes we investigated, the
accused had been identified but the police did not press charges and
closed the investigation within months.
In Bijnore, this played
out in full police and media presence on July 5, 2018, when an
interfaith couple, Monica and Suhel, were assaulted by BJP activists
outside the Additional District Magistrate’s office where they had gone
to register their marriage, as directed by the Allahabad High Court.
According to Monica’s FIR, a
copy of which is with
FactChecker,
before they could do so, “a mob of 15-20 people led by Neeraj Vishnoi
and BJP leader Harjinder Kaur barged into the room and starting
assaulting and abusing us. Wanting to kill us, the mob even tried to
abduct us and warned me to not get married with my partner.”
Monica added that despite the Allahabad High Court’s directions to the police to protect the couple, she feared for their lives.
The FIR mentions Kaur’s BJP links, and police officials told
FactChecker that Vishnoi is a part of several Hindu right-wing organisations.
However, five months after the incident, when
FactChecker visited
Bijnore’s Kotwali Shahar police station where the FIR was lodged, the
investigations had been shut down. “The couple was not keen on pursuing
the case and hence, we found no point in pressing it,” one police
official said, speaking anonymously.
In Moradabad, Haji Aslam
had a similar experience. A meat-trader, 38-year-old Aslam’s mini-van
was burnt down by five men on two motorcycles in August 2018.
Haji
Aslam outside his house in Moradabad city, western Uttar Pradesh. He
recognised the Hindu men who set his mini-van afire, but police said
they would file an FIR only against “unknown” persons. Needing the FIR
to claim insurance, Aslam gave in. The case was closed, no arrests made.His
driven and cleaner, who were in the van, were dragged out, abused and
assaulted, and some people in the mob drove away in the van.
Driver Aamir and cleaner Asim have since taken up other jobs. “The mob called them ‘
katuwein’
[a communal slur referring to Muslim men] and asked them what they were
carrying. As soon as they responded, the mob dragged them out and
slapped them repeatedly,” Aslam said.
As soon as Aslam heard the news, he rushed to where the mini-van had been taken, in the heart of a Hindu-dominated
basti (hamlet)
,
a five-minute drive from the spot where the vehicle had been
intercepted. “A huge crowd had gathered there to witness the burning of
my mini-van. I heard slogans being shouted,” he said.
Aslam
rushed to a local police post to get help. A constable accompanied him,
“saw the sight [of the burning mini-van] and said there was nothing he
could do. Instead, he told me to flee from the
basti or else the mob would kill me too,” Aslam said.
Aslam
then went to the Katghar police station in Moradabad city to register
an FIR. The police did register one, but with different facts. “They
insisted that I say that the mini-van was burnt by some locals who were
upset with the pungent smell [of rotting animal remains],” he said.
When
he refused, the police suggested another change–that Aslam record an
FIR against “unknown” persons. Aslam refused: “After all, I had seen
those people burning the van. I could not forget them. I knew their
names, too; some of them were with the Shiv Sena.”
But the
police insisted. Aslam was desperate–he needed to register an FIR to
claim insurance for the van, whose loss had destroyed his livelihood. He
had bought the van only two years earlier and was still paying off the
loan. “I gave in. They realised my weakness and told me that they
wouldn’t help me if I insisted on the names,” he said.
The “unknown” people were never arrested, and the police closed the investigations less than four months later.
When
FactChecker visited
the Katghar police station, the Station House Officer, Komal Singh,
said he did not know enough about the case.. “The officers in-charge of
that case have been transferred out,” he said.
Aslam said he no
longer cared about the outcome of the investigations. “Nothing is going
to come out of this. I am certain the police won’t do anything,” he
said.
This is the second of a six-part series. You can read the first part here.Next: Why Police Action Across UP’s Hate Crime Hot Spots Is Causing Fear And Alarm Among Muslims(Purohit is
an independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development,
migration and the intersections between them. He is an alumnus of the
School of Oriental and African Studies, London.)
Uttar Pradesh Police personnel deployed outside Aligarh Muslim University gate during students’ protest in Aligarh on Wednesday. (Source: PTI) 
Uttar Police personnel use gas shells to disperse the Aligarh Muslim University students protesting at the gate
Hindu Yuva Vahini office in Meerut. (Express Photo: Lalmani Verma)
