The widespread and under-reported use of explosives by Hindu mobs in the Delhi violence | Prabhjit Singh / Caravan Magazine, July 6, 2020

 Dead and Buried

The widespread and under-reported use of explosives by Hindu mobs in the Delhi violence

Prabhjit Singh 

 

06 July 2020

 

A man throws a petrol bomb at a Muslim shrine in northeast Delhi on 24 February. In the violence that swept the national capital in late February, numerous complaints by Muslim residents accused Hindu mobs of using explosives.

Danish Siddiqui/REUTERS

In the wake of the carnage that swept northeast Delhi in late February, news reports on the violence appear to have missed one prominent element—the recurrent and devastating use of explosives by Hindu mobs. Numerous complaints filed before the Delhi Police by Muslim residents of the area, which The Caravan has copies of, accuse mobs of destroying lives and property with the use of bombs. But the media coverage of the issue predominantly focused on the use of explosives in one particular instance—those discovered on the terrace of Tahir Hussain, an Aam Aadmi Party councilor accused of killing an Intelligence Bureau staffer, Ankit Sharma. Yet, these complaints spoke of Hindu mobs using explosives openly and without fear, with accounts of such attacks from northeast Delhi’s Mustafabad, Chand Bagh and Karawal Nagar areas. [ . . .]

https://caravanmagazine.in/crime/widespread-under-reported-use-of-explosives-by-hindu-mobs-in-delhi-violence

Genealogy of a Pogrom: Reflections on the mob violence against Muslims in Delhi | Tanweer Fazal, The Baffler, March 26 [2020]

From: The Baffler, March 26 [2020]

 

[by] Tanweer Fazal 

 

Communal violence is a structural given of Indian society. In seventy-odd years of independence, hardly a season has passed without murderous attacks on vulnerable castes and religious minorities—crimes that generally go unprosecuted. Even pogroms have a long history here. In Delhi in November 1984, nearly three thousand Sikhs (official figures peg it at 2,300) were butchered in just three days, as mobs incited by leaders of the Congress Party engulfed the city in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
Though the scale of the carnage was different, there are parallels between the events of 1984 and the horrific attacks on Muslims in northeast Delhi last month. In both cases, the state remained a bystander, while the perpetrators—drawn largely from among the foot soldiers of the ruling party—were allowed to wreak mayhem. However, in the state-led dominant discourse, the “de-nationalization” of the Sikhs had begun earlier, to counter the Khalistan movement for a separate Sikh homeland that had erupted in the 1970s. The movement gained sizeable support among the Sikh youth after Indian army’s Operation Blue Star (1984) to flush out militants from the Golden Temple collaterally resulted in killing of a huge number of pilgrims and destruction of the shrine. When the prime minister was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards as an act of revenge, the Congress Party flagrantly communalized matters. Eliminating a Sikh body was made into a kind of “national cause”—a means, no matter how grotesque, to reaffirm one’s patriotism.
The Delhi attacks likewise come in the wake of mass protests, with a proud and visible Muslim presence, against 2019’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which introduces a religious qualification for citizenship, offering undocumented migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan a route to naturalization, provided they are not Muslim. (In this it resembles the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany and Law of Return of Zionist Israel). The CAA, coupled with the currently stalled National Register of Citizens, threatens to deprive a large section of India’s Muslims, now forced to scramble to find the right “papers,” of their citizenship entitlements. It represents yet another step in the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party’s decades-long campaign to denationalize Muslims. The powerful civilian resistance evidently upset the government. “Bharat Mata ki jai” (Glory to Mother India) and “Jai Sri Ram” (Glory to Lord Ram) reverberated in the air as armed Hindu men went around in the third week of February, punishing Indian Muslims for their opposition to Mr. Modi’s diktat.
The violence began on February 23, 2020, and continued unabated for the next two days: as stone pelting and intermittent skirmishes between pro and anti-CAA factions gave way to targeted attacks by armed Hindu gangs on Muslim lives, their homes, petty establishments, mosques, and madrasas. Credible accounts confirm that the marauders were allowed a free run and were even given an occasional helping hand by the police, arguably making the state complicit in the violence. Video images now floating across social media platforms capture the callousness of the officials and the participation of a section of the constabulary. Not a single shot was fired to restrain the mobs, even though the dead include a policeman.

For most of Delhi’s middle-class residents, the violence seemed to be happening at a distance, perpetrated on a shadowy populace who deserved it.

The slaughter strangely coincided with the state visit of President Donald Trump to the city—it was his interactions with Modi, not the mob attacks, that India’s television stations chose to cover—which now serves as an alibi for the city police to explain its state of inertia. As of this writing, the death toll has exceeded fifty, with several still missing, and many killings may remain unreported. Scores of others have been left brutalized, with severed limbs, gunshot wounds, acid burns, lost livelihoods, and scarred memories. (A fraction of those killed and injured are Hindu residents, as well.) Reports make it clear that this was a premeditated terror attack, not an impulsive outburst.
The Northeast district of Delhi, the main theater of violence, is a working-class neighborhood that has endured years of neglect and suffers from a scarcity of amenities. Nearly one third of its population are Muslims who either are daily wage earners or work in the low-paid, unauthorized sweatshops that dot the area’s congested lanes. There are others who over the years were able to establish their own shops, businesses, and trades—many of which were gutted in this communal fury.
The Northeast never features in representations of Delhi as a global city. The miserable Muslim poor have been entirely removed from the dreamworld of the middle class, an economic and spiritual apartheid whose depth was made evident by the shocking indifference with which a majority of Delhi-ites ignored this public pogrom. While the capital’s northeast district was burning, for the rest of the city-dwellers it was business as usual. Offices, shops, footfall in the malls and the theaters, schools and colleges, traffic snarls—the ingrained routines of metropolitan life remained unaffected. For most of Delhi’s middle-class residents, the violence seemed to be happening at a distance, perpetrated on a shadowy populace who probably deserved it.
This is not to suggest that middle-class Hindus have no culpability in what happened. For years they have been perpetrating hate from their living rooms and offices, spreading a continuous flow of venomously anti-Muslim online material: distorted images, rabid speeches, and disinformation meant to keep the pot boiling. Even as Muslims were being killed on the streets, WhatsApp groups of old schoolmates, resident welfare associations, citizen groups, and sundry other groups participated in the virtual propaganda war, tacitly registering their participation in the kill-fest. This cocktail of apparent apathy, even callousness, and hateful online messaging shows the extent to which majoritarianism has come to shape ordinary Indian/Hindu selves.

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The BJP’s thumping victory in the general elections last year reflects the consolidation of right-wing hegemony in India. The party initially rose to prominence in the late 1980s, when it took up the cause of building a Ram temple in place of historic Babri mosque at Ayodhya (this is known as the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign). The eventual demolition of the mosque in December 1992, a crime in which several BJP leaders were implicated, only cemented the party’s newfound popularity among Hindus. The period also coincided with the liberalization of the country’s economy and the consequent expansion of the urban middle class, who became the BJP’s social base. Since then the party has advanced a two-pronged strategy—pathological nationalism that survives on minority-baiting on the one hand, and a fanatical neoliberal commitment to economic developmentalism on the other—that has come to find wider favor in the country, among both the affluent and the impoverished.

Asad Ashraf

Yet it would be a mistake to measure the BJP’s power in purely electoral terms. Its ultimate aim has always been to reconfigure India—which is nominally a secular, democratic country—along principles of racial purity, religious nationalism, and ethnically differentiated citizenship. In pursuing these goals, through both political and cultural projects, the party has brought about an astonishing change to Indian society, weakening governmental institutions, unleashing communal demons, eroding the rule of law. Today it would be at best a half-truth to describe India as a constitutional republic: for foundational ideas of democracy, freedom, and justice have been turned upside down. Vigilante groups and lynch mobs are free to kill Muslims and instill fear in the community. BJP leaders are allowed to openly spew hate speech, even calling for violence on the Muslim community. Television media parrots and amplifies the government’s communal line. In courts, justice has come to mean reparation for imagined historical wrongs on the Hindu community. For instance, last year the Supreme Court ruled that a Ram Temple should be built on the site of the Babri mosque.

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The speed with which India has embraced such virulent forms of Islamophobia cannot be explained by the BJP’s propaganda alone. The party has taken root in soil that was already communalized. The loyalty of Muslims, India’s largest minority, has been held suspect in the majoritarian narratives ever since Independence and partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Equating religion with a form of a nationality, Hindu nationalist thinkers have presented Muslims as a fifth column for Pakistan.
Yet this portrayal of Muslims predates Partition. Its origins go at least as far back as the nineteenth century, when a modern “Hindu” consciousness was being forged in the crucible of colonialism. Drawing on British orientalist historiography, which presented Islam as a “foreign” religion, Hindu reformist thinkers came to imagine the modern nation of “India” as a spiritual homeland for Hindus, besieged by foreigners both European and Muslim. Over time they developed a baroque, hoary mythology about the so-called Muslim conquest, focused on the forceful abduction, violation, and conversion of Hindu women by Muslim men. In the early twentieth century, as colonial institutions based on communal representation were opened to the natives, a panic around shrinking numerical strength, not to mention physical and political potency, became entrenched in the Hindu nationalist imaginary.

More

The Demagogue and His Labyrinth

By The Baffler

This form of “othering” has found its most virulent expression in the discourse of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the cultural outfit which essentially controls the BJP. Founded in 1925 in Nagpur by a group of upper-caste Brahmins, and explicitly modelled on Mussolini’s fascist party, it is the oldest, largest, and arguably the most successful far-right group in the world today. The RSS instills in its cadre a ferocious hatred of Muslims, who are viewed as a barbaric internal enemy—fanatically driven by the sword, hypersexual, and bearers of divided loyalties. Writing in 1939, one of the organization’s longest serving chiefs, M.S. Golwalkar, laid down the conditions under which the Muslim could be accepted into India: they would be “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen’s right.”
For the RSS, stereotyping and demonizing of the Muslim has served the equally important purpose of cementing the Hindu nation, beleaguered as it is by its own internal segments of hierarchically organized caste groups, cults, and sects. V. D. Savarkar, perhaps the most influential Hindutva ideologue, spelled this idea out in his 1923 tract, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu, a founding document for the far-right Hindu movement: “Nothing makes [the] Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self. Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the pressure of a common foe.”

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The Hindu right remained politically marginalized for the first four or so decades of Indian independence. Yet during this period, the RSS spread its communal venom at the grassroots level, indoctrinating youth at its schools, spiritual camps, and “shakhas,” or training units in villages and towns across the country. (The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a cultural organization that provides the shock troops for the RSS, also participated in numerous communal attacks across the country.) Things changed in 1990, when L. K Advani—a RSS graduate and the then BJP president—embarked on a Rath yatra (roughly “chariot pilgrimage”), traveling with followers across North India, holding politico-religious rallies at which he exhorted Hindu youth to join the Ram Janmabhumi campaign.
Advani’s Rath Yatra, which left a trail of communal killings and destruction in its wake, was finally abandoned when he was detained in Bihar by the state’s secular chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. But by that time his task had been more or less achieved—the forging of a new Hindu public for whom secularism, a constitutional guarantee, was reinscribed as minority appeasement towards Muslims. Indoctrinated into the Hindutva ideology, right-wing Hindus began to demand sovereignty of faith over state in matters related to Hindu religiosity. In this pernicious new discourse, any advance in the protection of minority cultures or demands of parity between Hindus and Muslims came to be dismissed as “pseudo-secularism” (this remains a popular term of abuse in right-wing Indian circles).

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The persistence of communal violence in India has prompted two broad responses from liberal intellectuals, neither of them really satisfactory. One school, comprised largely of Gandhian and other anti-modernist thinkers, has come to question the very efficacy of secularism in the Indian context, underscoring—more or less—the concept’s foreignness. It is unreasonable, these thinkers argue, to expect the Indian masses to cast aside their religious attachments. Instead, they seek to recover an “ancient” tradition of authentically Indian tolerance, rooted in religiosity yet simultaneously secular, which they offer as an antidote to rising fanaticism. The weaknesses of this position are self-evident. In the first place, the “Indian tolerance” narrative is based on an idyllic past which never existed; episodes of communal violence, as historians like Christopher Bayly have showed, occurred even in pre-colonial India. More perniciously, this anti-secular argument caters to the Hindutva theory that Hindus are an innately “tolerant” people, led astray (probably by the bloodthirstiness of Abrahamic faiths). Indeed, the anti-modernists offered a counter politics uneasily reminiscent of nineteenth century Hindu cultural rejuvenation.

The police and security apparatus of the state has viewed minorities—be it Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs, or Adivasis (Indigenous people)—as the nation’s demonic other.

The other response comes from modernists and left-wing intellectuals, who insisted on a stricter application of the principles of secularism. They endorse something akin to the French practice of laïcité—an equidistance from all religions, a wall of separation between church and state, and the idea of a rootless, abstract citizenship. Under the cover of neutrality, however, this modernist approach frowns upon minority protection—such as affirmative action for Muslims and separate marriage laws— condemning these as illiberal and divisive. In an unfortunate way, this attitude too resonates with the Hindutva critique of the “pseudo-secular” state.
In any case, such discussions were largely limited to academia. Since independence, the Indian state’s actions have been governed by pragmatic considerations, rather than any lofty secular or constitutional principles. The Congress Party and other secular parties, which have ruled India for much of the past seventy-odd years, blended elements of both the contesting views: without really giving up on majoritarian rhetoric, they kept hopes in the system alive for the minorities. Thus, every incidence of violence against minorities, was almost invariably followed by institution of Inquiry Commissions, pronouncements of compensations, and assurances of justice—seldom if ever met. In sum, the Congress regime practiced a kind of ambivalent secularism, a half-hearted commitment, that made symbolic gestures towards the minorities when in distress while condoning communal violence at the ground level.
Worse still, entrusted with the task of securing the nation, the police and security apparatus of the state has viewed minorities—be it Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs, or Adivasis (Indigenous people)—as the nation’s demonic other, essentially sharing the attitude of the criminals they are tasked with restraining. The record of state complicity in communal violence is long and dismal. In Moradabad in 1980, the police opened indiscriminate fire on protesting namazis at an Eidgah leaving hundreds dead; in Hashimpura in 1987, police rounded up forty-two innocent men, and their decomposed bodies were fished out later from an irrigation canal; in Bhagalpur in 1989, violence raged on unabated for nearly two months, and the needle of suspicion pointed to the top brass of the city police, who delayed filing of First Information Reports (FIRs) against the real criminals, then filed FIRs against unknown persons—even when perpetrators were recognized by victims—conducted shoddy investigations, thus ensuring impunity; the Srikrishna Commission Report set up to investigate the Mumbai “riots” that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, listed eleven incidents in which thirty-one police officers were found actively participating in violence targeting Muslim residents. And this is not even considering police complicity in the caste atrocities and land-grabs of Adivasi territory that are the ambient violence of modern India.

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The malevolent pragmatism of the Congress Party has now given way to a more full-blooded, and brash majoritarianism under the BJP. We were given a taste of the BJP’s “handling” of communal violence in 2002, when the state of Gujarat, then overseen by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, witnessed a horrific, protracted anti-Muslim pogrom—an event widely understood as marking a turning point in Indian politics. The trouble is said to have begun when fifty-odd Karsevaks (RSS activists), returning from Ayodhya where they had been agitating for the Ram temple, were mysteriously burnt to death inside a train. This incident is supposed to have provoked three months of retributive attacks against Muslims, a reign of terror and unspeakable barbarism that left nearly two thousand dead, besides numerous others injured and uprooted.

The malevolent pragmatism of the Congress Party has now given way to a more full-blooded, and brash majoritarianism under the BJP.

Accounts of police officials and findings by citizen’s groups highlight how the rioters were allowed to take their revenge on ordinary Muslims. Indeed, this was probably the first time in modern India that the state made no pretense of neutrality and impartiality during the orgy of rape and killing. All through the pogrom, local police either watched as bystanders, or actively participated in the crimes, while the central reserve were prevented from deploying. In terms of logistics and mechanics of violence, Delhi in 2020 mirrors what was seen and observed in Gujarat in 2002. In both cases, the attacks were sophisticated—gas cylinders, usually in short supply, were aplenty and produced in advanced, used to burn down shops, houses, mosques and schools. Then as now mobs moved into the lanes and bylanes of localities with diverse populations, and with near immaculate precision, were able to distinguish what was Muslim from that which was not—which rebuffs the argument that the violence was spontaneous.
In the aftermath of the Gujarat brutality, Modi’s state government came down heavily on Muslims accused of burning down the train carrying RSS activists, trying them under the freshly minted anti-terror law, POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act). By contrast, the Hindus accused of arson and killing, on the other, attracted the provisions of ordinary Indian Penal Code. Muslims, who by far made up the majority of victims, were being framed as perpetrators simply on the basis of their religion.
The BJP response this time around has been more galling, if that is at all possible. After the killings in Delhi, there was not even the fig leaf of posturing from the ruling party: no imperative to assuage memories of brutalities, no assurance of reparations, little talk of relief camps for victims. Home minister Amit Shah’s remarks about the attacks in Parliament was illuminating. He offered no community segregated figures of death and destruction, placed the burden of igniting and inflaming violence on Muslim activists and anti-CAA protesters, and spared even a mention of leaders from the Hindutva camp, many of whom were caught on camera making incendiary speeches. In a nutshell, the BJP government imputed that Muslims inflicted violence upon themselves, as they did on some Hindus. Shah assured the Indian people that the perpetrators would be made to pay for their intransigence.

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Riots in India have been typically followed by efforts to displace blame. And when the victims of violence are disproportionately Muslim, as is usually the case, attempts are made to justify the perpetrators’ crimes. “Every action has its reaction,” Modi infamously declared in 2002, implicitly blaming the Muslims for the savagery unleashed on them, while also subtly making a case that the Hindu violence was a just and spontaneous response.
Even mainstream politicians and commentators tend to occlude history when discussing communal attacks, reducing events to their immediate trigger: whether it is an allegation of cow slaughter, sacrilege of some kind, or an innocuous flare-up involving members of the two communities (from the early history of Hindu-Muslim violence, the nodes of incitement, which implicitly lay the blame on Muslims, have remained virtually unchanged.) A new paranoia of the Hindu right is “love jihad,” the idea that Muslim men lure innocent Hindu women into romantic relationships, and by extension, into global jihad (though this also reworks the staple of Hindutva trope of hypersexual Muslims). Yogi Adityanath, the BJP monk turned Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, called upon Hindu youth to entice a hundred Muslim women for each reported case of “love jihad.” Such narratives, invoking fear, terror, and horror of the other, are the routine precursors to conflict, a match that sets off a familiar flame.

The very sight of a Muslim has become an anathema to the Hindutva consciousness.

What is novel about the Delhi pogrom is that there was no identifiable trigger, though the BJP has made some efforts to concoct excuses in retrospect. After all, the anti-CAA protests, despite innumerable provocations (including threats from gun-wielding vigilantes) have remained adamantly peaceful. Constitutionalism has been celebrated; portraits of the document’s architect, Dr. Ambedkar, adorned the walls of various protest sites—a display which exposed the thinness of right-wing commitment to constitutional values. The protestors also have felt compelled to reaffirm their own patriotism, decking various occupations with the national flag, which amounted to breaking up the BJP’s vile monopoly over national allegiance.
But for the killers, who set out in the garb of pro-CAA protesters, such gestures meant little. No amount of patriotism would douse their blinding fury. No symbol of constitutionalism was sacred in their eyes. And indeed in India today, no longer do terrible crimes need be attributed to the Muslim to legitimate her brutalization. And no amount of structural humiliation—incarcerations, disenfranchisement, relentless economic marginalization—will satiate the Hindu right’s bloodthirst. The very sight of a Muslim has become an anathema to the Hindutva consciousness. It would appear the long-drawn project aimed at weaponizing the supposedly “Hindu nation” is at last complete.

Tanweer Fazal is professor of Sociology at University of Hyderabad. He works and writes on subjects of nationalism, community formation, minority rights, and collective violence. He is the author of ‘Nation-state’ and Minority Rights in India: Comparative Perspectives of Muslim and Sikh Identities (London; Routledge, 2015), Minority Nationalisms in South Asia (ed. London: Routledge, 2012) and The Minority Conundrum: Living in Majoritarian Times (Delhi: Penguin, 2020)

India: In our history of communal riots, where does Delhi stand? Jyoti Punwani

Rediff.com » News » In our history of communal riots, where does Delhi stand?
In our history of communal riots, where does Delhi stand?
By JYOTI PUNWANI
March 11, 2020 08:22 IST

'The humanity displayed by ordinary, lower middle class residents of north east Delhi -- Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs -- will be remembered perhaps even more than the evil wrought in the riots,' notes Jyoti Punwani.

[ . . . ]

https://www.rediff.com/news/special/in-history-of-communal-riots-where-does-delhi-stand/20200311.htm

India: Delhi Violence Aftermath: Loss Lives in Memory, Hate on Smartphone | Natasha Badhwar

The Quint

Delhi Violence Aftermath: Loss Lives in Memory, Hate on Smartphone
Natasha Badhwar

In the last week of February, when a journalist asked me if the communal carnage that engulfed north-east Delhi felt amplified because it had happened in the Capital, and in my own hometown, I had answered that it didn’t affect me more or less than violence in other parts of India.
Two weeks later, as I begin typing here, I realize that I had answered wrongly. Perhaps I had been numbed by shock then and the enormity and aftermath of the violence that we are witnessing is now beginning to sink in. The process of writing this column is forcing me to acknowledge the inconvenient truths that I have been trying not to think about.

How Victims Recount Loss

Two days after targeted mob violence in the week of 23 February, 2020 had forced thousands of Muslim survivors of Shiv Vihar to flee their burnt homes and seek refuge in safer places, I was part of a citizens’ team that met them at the construction sites and other makeshift relief camps where they were huddled together.

“I sent my son back to our charred home to give water to our goats,” Khatoon said to me, holding my hands in hers. “They hadn’t even spared our goats. They were all dead.” She closed her eyes as tears welled up. “How can I tell you my grief,” said Anisha, as her two adolescent daughters held on to her from both sides. “All I have left are the clothes I am wearing, but I keep thinking of my children’s school that has been burnt down. Where will they go now? They will lose an entire academic year.”

As a listener, I was surprised by the minutiae of the loss the victims were expressing.

Everything they owned had been burnt to cinders, their livelihood was destroyed, it was hard to predict how long the process of rebuilding their lives would be, yet it was the small details that seemed to be hurting the most.
Can Delhi Violence be Called a Pogrom?

The same evening, I was part of ‘The Big Fight’, a debate show hosted by Nidhi Razdan on New Delhi Television (NDTV) that was focusing on the state’s inadequate response in terms of providing rescue and relief measures. I asked a teammate if I could describe what we were witnessing as a pogrom. “It is a pogrom,” she said emphatically. “How do we define it,” I asked, just to be sure. Of the 53 confirmed deaths so far, 35 victims have been identified as Muslim and over a dozen as Hindu.

“It’s a pogrom when a mob attack against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority is enabled by the state either by their passivity in the face of violence or by their active participation in it,” she said.

“How we define and categorize violence matters,” writes Ashutosh Varshney, a professor of political science at Brown University and the director of Centre for Contempotrary South Asia. He elaborates that while the first day of the violence was more like a violent clash between groups, “but the next two days began to look like a pogrom, as the police watched attacks on the Muslims and was either unable to intervene, or unwilling to do so, while some cops clearly abetted the violence.”
Visible Violence, Ongoing Hate

What is astounding about the violence unleashed in Delhi is how visible it has been—literally live-streaming on social media platforms—and yet it has been allowed to escalate as if all the powers who can intervene have become wilfully deaf, mute and blind. In a viral video that I saw on my husband’s WhatsApp feed, the bearded man who is leading a mob attack is also filming it and is streaming it live on his Facebook profile. In the 4- minute clip, the man is exhorting a group of men to pick up bricks from a pile lying in the middle of a main road and throw them at Muslims.

He repeats the chants, Jai Shri Ram (Glory to Lord Ram) and Bharat Mata ki Jai (Glory to mother India).

“Don’t go back. Keep going forward. Hindutva will not be weakened,” he yells. “Those Hindus who are at home, share this video.”

From a distance, one hears the sound of a blast. “Throw the bombs,” he says with renewed energy. “My hands are hurting,” he says after a while.

Delhi police and paramilitary forces in green camouflage uniforms are standing by as the violence continues to escalate. Their postures are relaxed, they are neither intervening in the action, nor feeling threatened by it. When the video ends and the roar of the mob subsides abruptly, one is left stunned by the chaos one has witnessed.

Also Read : ‘Can’t Look At it’: Victim on His Viral Photo from NE Delhi Arson
Culprits Can Be Seen in Viral Videos but What is Police Doing?

In a two-tweet thread on twitter, this video has also been shared by Mohammad Zubair, co-founder of Alt News, the popular fact-checking website. He has tagged @DelhiPolice in his tweet, offering the video as evidence on which they can act. As violence erupted in various parts of north-east Delhi, and even as mainstream mediapersons scrambled to reach the area, videos of mob attacks, lynching, destruction of mosques and burning of vehicles, shops and homes continued to flood social media.

Attacks on property and people continued for two days and nights, despite the fact that the offices of the Central and state governments are within a few kilometres of the area.

In another widely shared video, a group of injured young men are lying on the road, some of them writhing in pain, and quite incongruously, one of them is singing the national anthem. The victims are surrounded by men in police uniform, who are mocking them for having had the audacity to protest against the recent Citizenship (Amendment) Act by forcing them to sing the anthem and chant azaadi. Less than a week later, one of the victims, Faizan, died in hospital after languishing in police custody and being denied medical aid.
Unending Cycle of Victimisation

The fate of Faizan has followed the same pattern as the last days of Tabrez Ansari, a 24-year-old man who was lynched in Jharkhand in June 2019. For hours, Ansari was tied to a pole, made to chant Hindu slogans and was assaulted on camera by men who accused him of being a thief. When the police took the victim into custody, photographs published in newspapers show Ansari walking into the police station without support, yet he succumbed to internal injuries a few days later.

In case after case of hate crimes in contemporary India, victims have been criminalized and the perpetrators—many of whom are visible on camera—enjoy complete impunity. In many cases, the original assault doesn’t kill the victims; it is the complicity of the police and apathy of the state that causes the death of the victims.

The targeted attacks on the homes, properties and lives of people in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh are playing out in the same pattern as the series of lynchings that India has witnessed in the last six years. Despite multiple witnesses to each of the crimes and the presence of security personnel, no one seems to be able to stop them.

Victims, their families, and those who are trying to help them find themselves screaming into a vacuum. They can hear their own voice, but it doesn’t seem to reach where it matters.

Videos of violence are playing and replaying on millions of smartphones, and yet the crimes have been invisibilized by a state that refuses to acknowledge what it can see.

(Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker and author. She tweets at @natashabadhwar. This is a personal blog, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

India: Left and liberals should stop looking for the perfect victim in Delhi riots 2020

The Print, 2 March, 2020


Left and liberals should stop looking for the perfect victim in Delhi riots

There's damning evidence of state complicity in the Delhi communal riots. This matters more right now.
Asim Ali

Social media has been consumed in the last few days in futile, and often unresolvable, arguments over which ‘side’ — whether ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ mobs — committed which particular atrocity. These slanging matches are not just unseemly but also divert attention away from the one clear fact that matters right now — the state’s complicity in the riot, in which at least 42 people have died so far and more than 250 injured.

A section of the Left liberal and Muslim intelligentsia has become overly invested in the ‘perfect victim’ narrative. This narrative insists that there was either no violence committed by the Muslim side or the violence committed was purely ‘defensive’. This insistence draws them into dissecting each episode of violence for ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ mob responsibility.

But in the Hobbesian mayhem of riots, there are rarely ever perfect victims. Unless a minority community is rendered powerless by its meagre numbers, such as in the case of the 2002 Gujarat riots or the 1984 Delhi anti-Sikh riots, there would likely be no singular victims or perpetrators. Muslims account for approximately 30 per cent of the population of Northeast Delhi, the epicentre of the violence.

Truth, especially in an event as murky as riots, is messy. And when we become overinvested in narratives, we either deflect from or reflexively dismiss any evidence that might complicate our narrative of an incident.

Also read: Lies are the staple of every communal disturbance and Delhi riots are no different
Avoiding the ‘one-sided violence’ narrative

While much of the violence from the Muslim side might have been ‘defensive’, there has emerged, in what has to be acknowledged, a significant body of evidence that indicates targeted attacks on Hindus by ‘Muslim mobs’.

In Brahmpuri, for instance, a mob surrounded a Hindu father-son duo passing on a motorcycle, lynching the father and severely injuring the son. The son recalls the crowd chanting Muslim religious slogans. Another Hindu resident of Brahmpuri was stoned to death. The barricades that overnight sprung up in the lanes of this region Tuesday, for ‘security’, were enacted by both Hindus and Muslims.

According to an article in Scroll, “roads on both sides of the canal” in Brijpuri that indicated areas of Hindu and Muslim majority were found “strewn with bricks and..lined with charred shops”. Other accounts of the events in Brijpuri Tuesday suggest the existence of rampaging mobs from both sides.

The family of Intelligence Bureau officer Ankit Sharma has emphasised that it was a Muslim mob that was behind his disappearance (and killing) from Chand Bagh.

Clinging to a purely ‘one-sided violence’ narrative in the face of such evidence would neither be moral nor prudent.

The debate over these riots must not be allowed to devolve into who killed whom or a macabre comparison in body counts. Even if some Muslim mobs carried out targeted attacks, the political and moral responsibility of the violence would still rest on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, and its underlying ideology of Hindutva.

And acknowledging the Hindu victims of these riots (the Hindu death toll is now a double-digit figure) isn’t preventing scholars like Ashutosh Varshney from terming the violence ‘pogrom’. Varshney, who is one of the foremost researchers on riots, notes that pogrom mainly means when violence against an ethnic minority is organised and “officially condoned by authorities”.

The clips showing Delhi Police either looking on or abetting the Hindu mobs certainly demonstrates this culpability of the state authorities. Indeed, as Varshney noted in a tweet on 26 February: “Delhi riots of this week are now beginning to look like a pogrom…”

Also read: Kejriwal is wrong. Delhi to Gujarat, outsiders blamed in riots, but most victims know attackers
The three stages of Delhi’s riot production

The most damning evidence of state complicity is the very fact that riots continued unabated for several days.

Steven Wilkinson, who has compiled and analysed several decades of data on riots, concluded in his book Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India that “in virtually all the empirical cases I have examined, whether violence is bloody or ends quickly depends not on the local factors that caused violence to break out but primarily on the will and capacity of the government that controls the forces of law and order.” This is because, Wilkinson cites studies to argue, rioters are “unwilling…to confront armed and determined police who are prepared to use deadly force to stop them”.

What is important is not the patchy details of a communal riot, which deflects from the ruling party’s complicity, but the dynamics of what political scientist Paul Richard Brass calls the “institutionalised system of riot production.”

Riots, Brass writes in his book The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, are not spontaneous eruption of mass frenzy but carefully produced, like a theatrical production.

The Delhi riots perfectly display all the three phases of Brass’ system of riot production, and demonstrate the sole responsibility of the ruling party.

The first is preparation, where Hindu-Muslim tensions are kept on the boil through various inflammatory and inciteful acts. This was achieved during the 2020 Delhi assembly election, where the centrepiece of speeches of Home Minister Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was stoking fears and anxieties over protesting Muslims.

The second is activation, where (political) leaders signal the start of violence and mobs are led to activate the violence. BJP leader Kapil Mishra’s speech, and the arrival of Hindutva mobs on the Jaffrabad protest side on the first day of violence, precisely encapsulates the second phase.

The third phase is explanation, which we are entering now, where the cause of the riot would be obscured, and violence would be presented as spontaneous eruption of religious passions from both sides. It should be noted here that liberal journalists who present the ‘clashes’ as ‘political Hindutva vs radical Islam’ must desist from falling into this trap.

Also read: Delhi riots neither designed by Modi govt, nor Islamic conspiracy. It’s far more dangerous
Holding BJP to account

It suits the BJP if the framing of the violence is done mainly in terms of the competitive victimhood or relative responsibility of Hindus and Muslims. After all, the very purpose of riots, according to Wilkinson, is to be “a solution to the problem of how to change the salience of ethnic issues and identities among the electorate in order to build a winning political coalition”.

A more sagacious strategy, then, would be to move beyond this plane and emphasise the question: ‘Who let Delhi burn? And why?’

In our polarised times, it is the latter question that is more likely to inflict political and moral costs on the BJP, and hold it to account.

Also read: The Delhi pogrom 2020 is Amit Shah’s answer to an election defeat

As Brass notes, the duty of public commentary in the aftermath of a riot is to “fix responsibility and penetrate the clouds of deception, rhetoric, mystification, obscurity and indeterminacy”.

The author is a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. Views are personal.

India: Losing the plot - How AAP failed its Muslim citizens in the Delhi riots 2020

Losing the plot - How AAP failed its Muslim citizens in the Delhi riots

Aviral Anand 03 Mar 2020

https://sabrangindia.in/article/losing-plot-how-aap-failed-its-muslim-citizens-delhi-riots

Isaac Chotiner: The Real Objective of Mob Violence Against Muslims in India

Q. & A.
The Real Objective of Mob Violence Against Muslims in India

By Isaac Chotiner
The New Yorker, February 28, 2020

uring the past several days, more than thirty people have been killed in mob violence primarily targeting Muslims in the Indian capital of New Delhi. At the center of the conflict is the Citizenship Amendment Act (C.A.A.), a law passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian government that creates a path to citizenship for immigrants of different faiths—unless they happen to be Muslim. Its passage sparked demonstrations across the country, many of which have been met by force from police and right-wing groups. Indian journalists have chronicled police inaction as Muslims’ property has been destroyed and Muslim residents have been beaten. There have also been reports of police officers beating Muslims, including the imam of a local mosque. Many of the Hindu mobs have chanted “Jai Shri Ram,” or “Victory to Lord Ram,” a favored slogan of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.).

Modi, who took office in 2014, has in recent months moved aggressively to restrict the rights of Muslim residents. Before the passage of the C.A.A., in December, 2019, Modi’s government revoked the autonomy of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir, and implemented the National Register of Citizens (N.R.C.) in the state of Assam, which forced people to verify or forfeit their citizenship. And in Delhi on Sunday, a member of Modi’s party called on the police to get tough with protesters, or watch his followers do so. Several days later, Modi, who was hosting President Donald Trump when the violence broke out, belatedly called for the restoration of “peace and normalcy.”

To discuss the volatile situation in Delhi, I spoke by phone with Raghu Karnad, a journalist and the author of the book “Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War.” He was in northeastern Delhi this week, where he and several other journalists barely managed to escape a mob. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his experiences reporting on the violence, how the Modi government capitalizes on the conflict between Hindus and Muslims, and the difficulty of finding accurate reporting in India.

What have your experiences been like the past several days?

Wherever you go in the country, something seems to crop up with this protest movement. I went to the northeastern part of the city on Tuesday, to try and assess for myself what was happening there. What was evident through the afternoon was that gangs of young, angry men had been let loose on very marginal, vulnerable neighborhoods, and that police were either doing a very poor job or refraining from controlling them. The word that was used most was “clash”—that young Hindu and Muslim men were “clashing,” and committing violence and vandalism on each other’s property. What happens increasingly with events like this in India is that an intensely polarized and rapid-acting media machine makes it impossible to discern what is really happening, or what the facts on the ground are. Even if you work in the press, it is getting harder and harder to distinguish what an image is actually showing you. Was the video that has been sent to you that is supposed to show one community attacking another what it claims to be? Or is it something completely different? It became necessary for me to go down there and take the temperature of the place myself.

I want to go back to the news environment, but what did you mean by “let loose”? Because it is very hard to understand how much of this is planned and how much is spontaneous.

What was visible and obvious was that young men who were Hindu and young men who were Muslim were in confrontation, and there was an immediate dispute about which group was better armed, and whether it was the Hindus who were carrying firearms or the Muslims who were carrying firearms, whether it was the Hindus setting fire to shops or the Muslims setting fire to shops. If you have lived in India for long enough, or been a journalist here long enough, you try to tune that particular question out. Communal riots have been the permanent black eye on the face of Indian democracy, and it is only because we reduce them immediately to whether more Hindus were killed or more Muslims were killed, and which community was the guilty party, that the real question that never gets enough attention is why authorities fail to act in the moment to stop those riots. And that was exactly the salient question yesterday.

This is the capital of India. These regions are somewhat on the periphery, but you can jump on the metro and be there in thirty minutes from the center of Delhi. The police were obviously there in large numbers, and they were occasionally intervening and mostly standing by, and it is increasingly clear that they were sometimes slipping into participating into the violence themselves. We have images of police destroying security cameras and standing by while young men collect debris to pelt each other, and there are also allegations that the police did some of the throwing themselves. The principal question is why the police and the government allow the riots to take place, because it is clearly in their capacity to stop them. It’s also why it was interesting for me to go late in the evening, when a lot of journalists had drifted back to their newsrooms to file their stories and hand over footage, and to find that the police were literally standing by as gangs of young men continued to set homes on fire.

I understand the point you are making about the most important question not being who did what but, rather, why it is allowed to happen. But, just to clarify: If gangs of Muslim youths were burning Hindu temples, I assume the police would not let that occur, correct?

Yes, that’s definitely correct. And that was a case that was proven at the very start of this protest movement, which went national when groups of mostly Muslim protesters at a university called Jamia started a protest which became unruly, and they set fire to buses, and they were repaid for that with the police storming the university and intruding into the university library to assault and arrest students.

There is some contingency that depends on which government is in power and which government controls the police. When we are talking about Delhi in the present day, the control of the police is with the Home Ministry, which is in the central government, and what has been very clear is that the right of citizens—including, especially, Muslim citizens—to protest, even peacefully, is barely being respected. I think I am just trying to avoid saying the obvious here. At the end of the day, there was plenty of evidence that the violence continued and the young men allowed to remain on the street, and allowed to remain armed, were Hindu activists.

The reason the Delhi police are controlled by the Home Ministry is that it is the capital, correct?

Yes, they are controlled by the central government and not by the state government.
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And the Home Minister is Amit Shah, who is maybe Modi’s closest adviser and a hardcore supporter of his policies. Do you have some sense of what low-level police were being told from their superiors?

I was making many attempts to speak to policemen because, for safety, we were trying to move from one area to another and one police station to another, and mostly they were refusing to answer any questions at all, including any questions about the violence. One policeman told me something interesting, which was that that day might have been chosen because so much of the Delhi police force was drawn off into the security arrangements for Donald Trump, and, therefore, in these areas, the police were going to be understaffed, which would allow these mobs a freer hand. That may have been a factor, but that certainly doesn’t explain the extent to which the police seemed to be standing by. One thing the police were never going to say is what orders they received, and from whom. But, by that time, I was personally watching a group of young men shouting Hindu religious slogans and trashing vehicles while police stood by. For what I witnessed, it was clear that a lot of the violence was not going to be suppressed.

The evening ended for me when I and a pair of other journalists had to take flight from a mob ourselves. We were with a group of policemen who were carrying semiautomatics, and there were at least half a dozen of them. We thought at least that as journalists we were in a fairly secure position. But when the mob turned and approached us, and were jeering, saying, in Hindi, “Are you media people or Muslims?”—and using a derogatory phrase for Muslims—the police officer just signalled that we should run, and he would do his best to hold them, but that our safety was in our own hands. So we took to our heels.
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Do you have a sense, looking at the larger political context, why this was allowed to happen during Trump’s visit? Was it coincidental, or was some larger point being made?

The larger picture is much easier to describe right now. What happened yesterday, to my mind, is the culmination of a fairly explicit effort to reframe India’s protest movement from one as Indian citizens challenging the government into being a battle between Muslims and Hindus. That’s been in the cards for a while. The Modi government has had its share of setbacks in the last six years—there have been some economic-policy snafus, as well as larger and smaller political losses in state elections. But they have dominated in their narrative that India had opted out of the Gandhian or Nehruvian era and into a new Hindu-nationalist period, and that Hindu nationalists had the mandate to begin rewriting what India is.

And that had not been substantially challenged until a few months ago, with this protest movement. It is regrettable that the protest movement has been labelled the anti-C.A.A. movement, or the anti-N.R.C. movement, because it is clear from the protesters that it represents a much broader emotion, and a much more affirmative emotion, about a unified country, as well as an affirmation for India’s constitution as it is right now. That kind of challenge is one that the Modi government has never faced—nor has it faced as many people in the streets as we have seen in the last weeks. It is probably the largest popular civic movement in at least thirty years in this country.

We saw groups of Indian Muslims holding up Indian flags yesterday. Is what you are saying essentially that the government has been more uncomfortable with protests like that, and would prefer more typical Hindu-versus-Muslim tensions, and would prefer the debate be about that, rather than Indian citizenship and Indian democracy?

Yes, I think that’s true. What is new about this movement is that it has armored itself with national icons, like the flag and the national anthem and the preamble to the Indian constitution, which have been part of the chorus of the protests. So the government’s main line of attack against critics of the government—that they are “anti-national”—hasn’t been able to stick as well against large groups of people singing the national anthem. So then there has been a new effort to recharacterize the movement, not as one of Muslims trying to defend their citizenship rights but as a movement of Muslims disrupting the peace and subverting national security. It’s been fairly explicit with the language and tone and statements of B.J.P. leaders that they would prefer to address this as a “communal” issue, which is the phrase we use for religious divides—a communal matter between Hindus and Muslims, rather than a secular, larger, constitutional matter between citizens and a particular government agenda.

How would you describe the feelings of Muslim communities in Delhi right now?

Those areas of Delhi have seen a lot of riots and pogroms in the past. They are especially vulnerable, and especially economically marginalized. There is an area in northeast Delhi that is called Nasbandi Colony, which means “vasectomy colony,” because the people who were resettled there from slums in the center of Delhi were resettled only in exchange for being sterilized. That’s the level of how marginalized that area is.

This was during the so-called Emergency, forty years ago?

Yeah, that happened during the Emergency, and that is when Nasbandi Colony was formed. The moment that sticks in my mind from last night is when I was standing by a group of huts that were going up in flames and that had just been set on fire by a rioting gang. The slum dwellers who were watching part of their slum go up in flames told me that the gang belonged to a Hindu-activist group.

There were these other slum dwellers standing nearby who were Hindus, and they had not been attacked. They said the mob had told them, “As long as you say ‘Jai Shri Ram’ you’ll be fine, or you’ll be saved.” But this slum dweller was talking to me, and he said, “The thing is that they set the Muslims’ homes on fire, and then they left. But now this fire is burning in the middle of our community, and it’s going to burn, spread, and catch, and it could burn down the houses of non-Muslims, like us, as well.” And then he said, “And, the thing is, we don’t even have a water supply out here to put out the fire.” And I thought that was very poignant, because it underscored just how much damage it does to these communities to allow this kind of violence to take place. We’re looking at an enormous scale of damage, and these are people for whom even a wooden cart being set on fire can mean a family is reduced from poverty into penury.

It also reminds me of what we saw in Assam, where this registry was primarily intended to target Muslims, but, then, because of bureaucratic reasons, it ended up leaving a bunch of Hindus off the list, too, and they are now terrified about what it’s going to mean for them. Communal politics can have victims beyond the intended targets.

Absolutely. In fact, in Assam, the majority of the people who ended up excluded from the list turned out to be Hindus. And so, after this enormously laborious and costly campaign and exercise, the final N.R.C. list was rejected by every political party in the state. The final list didn’t serve the B.J.P., either, because Hindus were left out. Looking at what happened in Delhi yesterday just leaves you reeling at the thought of the cost that very poor Indians have to pay, regardless of what their religion is.

You alluded earlier to this idea that it was very hard to know what was actually going on. It seems that there is an abundance of fake news and edited videos circulating through apps like WhatsApp. You also have a certain amount of conformity, where a bunch of journalistic institutions in India see challenging the ruling party as either something you shouldn’t do or something that people don’t want to do for ideological reasons. Do you think about these things as distinct problems?

I think your analysis is bang on, and I think they are related problems. I admire the Indian press still, and I think that there are newspapers in India that are some of the best newspapers in the world, and are already beginning to separate the wheat from the chaff and produce a clear narrative of what happened yesterday. The problem is that, by the time they’re able to do that, the digital ecosystems have already been flooded with information that’s hard to distinguish from misinformation, while corporate news networks, which are particularly aligned with the ruling establishment and the B.J.P.—some of them have been owned by B.J.P. M.P.s—are only too happy to play on and exploit the ambiguity of this or are trying, very intentionally, to spread disinformation while they have the opportunity to do that.

So the value of sorting out a clearer narrative, even by the next morning, is kind of perplexing and really troubling for those of us who are attempting to do that. I’m glad I went in the evening rather than in the afternoon, because I think that, while the violence was in full swing that afternoon, it was too easy for every side to find the image and find the video clip that vindicated their politics, their ideology, or their industry. And by the evening, it was clear that many people had been wounded and killed—Hindus had been killed and Muslims had been killed. But in some areas it was much clearer that the authorities were only playing a role in protecting and enabling only pro-government mobs to stay on the streets.
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with major public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.

Delhi 2020 Communal Violence: Footage from From BBC VIdeo

No police force will support and assist a rioting mob unless the riot is orchastrated by the state itself pic.twitter.com/CPl14ffMrF

— Ravi Nair (@t_d_h_nair) March 4, 2020

The message from Delhi 2020 communal violence | Satish Deshpande

The Hindu, March 03, 2020

The message from Delhi
Satish Deshpande

More than mere ‘communal violence’, the recent events mark a disturbing turning point in contemporary Indian politics
[ . . . ]

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-message-from-delhi/article30965452.ece

India: A village burned unnoticed till residents moved into a shelter | Sweta Goswami , HT

https://m.hindustantimes.com/cities/a-village-in-ghonda-burnt-in-the-riots-unnoticed-till-its-residents-moved-into-a-relief-camp/story-PjUX5UcPgfIIxLraD5nMPI_amp.html?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR3UfybHY9TSW92DpI2pCFv1dlSxc9HUq2-dqfMh_MPkzg1Lqg5pM_QQLBc

A village burned unnoticed till residents moved into a shelter
Hassan, and members of his family are among the 42 families from Old Garhi Mendu village living in the relief camp set up at a community centre in Shriram Colony, right across Wazirabad road in Khajuri Khas.
Updated: Mar 01, 2020 05:33 IST

By Sweta Goswami, Hindustan Times New Delhi

For three days starting from February 23 evening the national Capital was on the boil as most parts of northeast Delhi were hit by communal riots that have claimed 42 lives so far and left more than 450 injured
For three days, starting from February 23 evening, the national Capital was on the boil as most parts of northeast Delhi were hit by communal riots that have claimed 42 lives so far, and left more than 450 injured. (Amal KS/HT PHOTO)

Around 6.30pm on Monday, Mehboob Hassan, 74, was preparing for evening prayers inside the small Mubarak mosque in Old Garhi Mendu village in north-east Delhi’s Ghonda assembly constituency when he heard a loud thud on the tin roof. Seconds later, as sounds persisted and grew louder, Hassan realised it wasn’t untimely rain, but stones being thrown at the mosque.

Hassan, the muezzin of the only mosque in the tiny Gujjar-dominated village, asked the four men who had come for namaz to rush out. Minutes later, around eight people entered the mosque and started breaking the taps and sound system, which Hassan had put in place moments ago.

“I was trying to get the keys to lock the mosque when they came running at me. They asked ‘namaaz padhayega?’ (will you read the namaaz?). I couldn’t utter a word. Some of them had rods, but most had wooden legs of charpoys in their hands. They hit me on the forehead and leg,” he said.

Hassan, and members of his family are among the 42 families from Old Garhi Mendu village living in the relief camp set up at a community centre in Shriram Colony, right across Wazirabad road in Khajuri Khas.


“Nobody — neither the police nor the city administration — knew about the riots in the village until victims started coming to this camp. On Friday, two area SDMs and the local police inspected the village and prima facie found that at least 15 houses, five shops, two godowns, one mosque and two to three cars were burnt. Some properties were damaged too, but nobody died. There are about five people with injuries,” said Sunil Kumar, a tehsildar who has been made the in-charge of the camp.

For three days, starting from February 23 evening, the national Capital was on the boil as most parts of northeast Delhi were hit by communal riots that have claimed 42 lives so far, and left more than 450 injured. Areas where riots were reported include Jafrabad, Maujpur, Brijpuri, Bhajanpura, Shiv Vihar, Mustafabad, Brahmpuri, Kardampuri, Gokalpuri, Jyoti Nagar, Jauhripur Extension, Babarpur, Karawal Nagar and some parts of New Seelampur and Khajuri Khas.

In Old Garhi Mendu village, violence raged for two days, as per accounts from multiple residents and local police officers. It started on February 24 with the attack on the mosque, after which most residents, primarily Muslims, fled to Shriram Colony where even Hindu households gave them shelter until the camp was opened.

But some like 62-year old Chand Bibi and her husband decided to stay put in their homes, a choice they call “the biggest mistake” they have made.

Around 8pm on February 25, a mob of around 25-30 people broke open the front gate of Bibi’s home — the first attack on day two. But, the group had a faux pas.

“They dragged my husband out and started sprinkling petrol from small plastic bottles onto a pile of clothes that we had and on the bed. They tried lighting a fire with a matchbox they had brought, but failed over and over again. They picked up the matchbox lying on our table and set the pile of clothes on fire,” Bibi said.

“Seeing the fire reach the bed, they began retreating, and I started throwing water at the fire. The last person to leave then shouted to the others ‘isne toh aag bujha di’ (she has doused the fire). But thankfully, he left,” she said.

By Saturday morning, the main road to the Old Garhi Mendu village was completely shut, making it inaccessible for any four-wheeler. While some houses were charred or locked, only residents in the ones with either a tile of a Lord Hanuman fixed at the front or ‘Jai Shri Ram’ flags fluttering from terraces led their lives normally.

According to 80-year-old Bhikhari Pradhan, the senior-most person in the village, the riots were orchestrated by outsiders. “We have lived together for decades. I even assured the most senior person from their (Muslim) community not to leave the village and asked him to tell others. But they all left. The violence was wrought by outsiders on the intervening night of February 25 and February 26 Our Gujjar brothers here had nothing to do with it,” he said.

At one end of the village, Rukmini Jairam, 31, was collecting sheets of half-burnt tin from a corner of the road. Close to the pile of rubble was an earthen furnace that, until Sunday, used to stay alight almost 10 hours a day to prepare meals and tea.
“This was my shop. I had set it up with the help of my husband. Nothing remains of it now,” she said.

When asked who did it, she said, “I don’t know. All Muslims who lived here have fled. It’s only us Hindus here now. I can’t tell.”

On Saturday, at the camp, at least eight civil defence volunteers and local revenue officers were seen filling forms for the victims to seek compensation from the Delhi government. “We have received about 38 applications, out of which 15 have been processed for the ex gratia compensation of ₹25,000, though the disbursal of the money will take two more days. There are at least 24 claimants in the Shriram Colony camp, so far, who prima facie have faced severe damage to their properties,” the tehsildar said.

The government has set up relief camps in eight night shelters as well, but there were hardly any takers as most victims from the affected areas have shifted in with friends and family.

It was only on Saturday, six days after he was hit, that the police came to the relief camp and took Hassan to get a medico-legal case (MLC) filed. “What is the point of doing the MLC now? What will they even find after so many days? On Monday and Tuesday, when our village was burning, I made a PCR call, like many others. The police officer said the area is not under his jurisdiction and added that even Hindus are suffering and Muslims are not the only ones,” said Mohammad Naushad, 29, a labourer from the village who came to the camp on Friday.

Many even said police started registering FIRs only from Friday evening. The local police said they have registered five cases from the area since Friday. Others complained of not being given any acknowledgement receipt either for the FIRs or the compensation forms they submitted.

They however said they were satisfied with the food and sleeping arrangements at the camp.

Around 3pm on Saturday, Shastri Park station house officer Pramod Gupta came to the camp to interact with inhabitants and convince them to begin thinking of returning to their village.

As victims asked for a guarantee of safety, Gupta said, “Kasoor aapka nahi, kasoor waqt ka hain. Waqt kharaab hota hain, tab aisa hota hain (the fault is not yours, it is of time. When the time is bad, then such things happen).”

To this, a faint voice responded from behind the crowd — “Waqt kharab nahi hota, waqt ko kharaab kiya jata hain (times are never bad. People make it so).” The person speaking was 35-year old Jahanara, whose shop and house were looted on day one and then gutted on day two of the riots in the village.

India: 50 years on, a look back at the 1969 riots that tore Gujarat

Ahmedabad Mirror | Updated: Sep 15, 2019,

50 years on, a look back at the 1969 riots that tore Gujarat

By Sharik Laliwala The 1969 riot saw the collapse of Gandhian consensus over Hindu-Muslim harmony, and in turn, the ris and successful solidification of Hindu nationalism in Gujarat’s modern politics

Read more at:
https://ahmedabadmirror.indiatimes.com/others/sunday-read/fifty-years-on-riot-that-tore-gujarats-fabric-of-unity/articleshow/71130444.cms

India: UP government denies permission to prosecute CM Yogi Adityanath for 2007 riots

The Economic Times

UP government denies permission to prosecute CM Yogi for 2007 riots
By Aman Sharma, ET Bureau | May 11, 2017, 05.41 PM IST

NEW DELHI: Banking on a report from the CBI's forensic lab in Delhi, the Uttar Pradesh government has denied its CB-CID Wing the permission to prosecute the present state chief minister Yogi Adityanath for his alleged hate speech in the 2007 Gorakhpur riots.


Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.comhttp://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/up-government-denies-permission-to-prosecute-cm-yogi-for-2007-riots/printarticle/58628713.cms

India: Three part investigation on Communal Rioting (Hindustan times)

Violent clashes broke out between two communities over a land dispute in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, in July 2014. Communal incidents have become more common in recent years, according to police records from across the state. (Shankar/ Hindustan Times)
http://www.hindustantimes.com/static/uttar-pradesh-communal-riot/anatomy-of-a-riot/

India: Meet The People Who Turned Bengaluru Into A City Of Fear And Despair (T.S. Sudhir)

Huffington Post India

Meet The People Who Turned Bengaluru Into A City Of Fear And Despair

he faultlines can no longer be ignored.

14/09/2016

TS Sudhir
Contributing Editor, HuffPost India

Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images
Vehicles are burnt by protesters at a bus depot in Bengaluru, September 12, 2016. (Xinhua/Stringer via Getty Images)

On Monday, Bengaluru saw for itself how Kannada activism has been hijacked. The preserve of intellectuals till the 1980s, it has progressively been lumpenised. Drawing on the Shiv Sena model of sub-nationalism and extortion to fuel itself, it culminated in manic Monday when competing groups out to control Bengaluru decided to log it out of its global image as India's Silicon Valley.

In a matter of a few hours, Bengaluru crashed into a deep gorge, a valley of fear and despair.

Over 500 people have been detained by the Bengaluru police in the last 24 hours. A majority of them rowdy sheeters in the city, mainly operating out of the northern and eastern parts of Bengaluru. On Monday, they had worked in tandem, converting areas in north and south-west Bengaluru into a theatre of arson, loot and destruction.

Over the past few years, several fringe groups have spread their tentacles in Bengaluru, in the garb of protecting Kannadiga pride. Carrying the red and yellow Kannada flag, the bigger groups are Karnataka Rakshana Vedike, Jaya Karnataka, Kannada Okkoota and Kannada Sena. But as the workload to carry out assignments grew, they have also grown amoeba-like into several smaller branches, available for a hit on speed dial.


It is only ironic that in outsourcing city Bengaluru, the task to derail Bengaluru is outsourced by shady political operators to these roll-call outfits. Bengaluru today is run by these people, whose groups have a track record of fomenting trouble at the drop of a coin.

Vatal Nagaraj is the most visible of these fringe group leaders, a rent-a-cause activist with the dubious claim of having organised over 10,000 protests in the last four decades. This maverick was the most visible face during the Karnataka bandh last week, his protest gulping the tonic of linguistic chauvinism to indulge in rabble-rousing. He took on Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar Shaw for her sarcastic tweet that Bengaluru should be renamed "Bandh-luru" and warned that anyone living in Karnataka will have to toe its line.

AFP/Getty Images
Bangalore, September 12, 2016. MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty Images.

Narayana Gowda heads Karnataka Rakshana Vedike, which agitates on issues as diverse as jobs for Kannadigas, imposition of English over Kannada, Cauvery dispute or Karnataka's border disputes. His Vokkaliga credentials helps him bond with politicians of the same caste, who have turned a blind eye to the Vedike's over-the-top activities.

There are others, with more shades of grey. Muthappa Rai, who heads Jaya Karnataka, was allegedly once a Dawood Ibrahim aide and reportedly involved in several murders. He was arrested in 2002 and extradited from Dubai and was described by filmmaker Ramgopal Varma as the "Bahubali of the underworld". His outfit's website claims a membership of over 7 lakh.

Sridhar, popularly referred to as "Agni" Sridhar, is a former rowdy, who now claims to be an intellectual. He even wrote a script based on the Bengaluru crime scene and directed a Kannada film Thamassu in 2010. His Kannada Sene, established six years ago, has taken on Shiv Sena in the Karnataka-Maharashtra border districts to assert Kannada supremacy.

Most of the youth are aged between 25 and 30 and are either daily wage labourers, construction workers or small-time property dealers. The red and yellow scarf around their neck turns them into a warrior on the street.

It now transpires that the Karnataka bandh on Friday was largely a Nagaraj and Karnataka Rakshana Vedike show, both scoring high on TRPs of a different kind — Turmoil Rating Points. With the Vedike and Jaya Karnataka in direct competition to control Bengaluru, Monday's violence was the result of competition between these fringe groups taking its toll on the city.

Senior police officers confirm that a majority of those picked up owe allegiance to these three outfits, even though all these fringe groups deny any hand in the violence. Most of the youth are aged between 25 and 30 and are either daily wage labourers, construction workers or small-time property dealers. The red and yellow scarf around their neck turns them into a warrior on the street.

Over the years, these fringe groups, emboldened by political protection, freelance for anyone who wants to use their services for a cause or against a rival. Many of them are known to run protection services, like mafia gangs, dividing Bengaluru into zones and areas. They also make their money on big-ticket land deals. Which is why the red and yellow flag today is used by shopkeepers not as a symbol of pride in being a Kannadiga but more to ward off troublemakers.

Senior police officers say this "parallel policing ends up enhancing the brand equity of these hoodlum gangs". Contrast it with how Bengaluru's brand equity has taken a hit with images of arson going viral. The fear factor that Monday has created, most feel, will come in handy when the groups go to collect funds from commercial establishments in the run-up to Karnataka Rajyotsav (Karnataka Formation Day) on 1 November.

The present situation gives Karnataka police an excellent opportunity to purge Bengaluru of these elements. All it needs to do is to seize the cellphones of those detained, peruse their call records, find out who called who in the 72 hours between Friday and Monday and connect the dots. The question is whether the black sheep in the political establishment will greenlight the action plan.

In 2009, when Shankar Bidari was Bengaluru's top cop, the police decided to call the Kannada outfits' bluff and cracked down on them. But in the last two years, they have gained strength again. "The party in power in Karnataka — irrespective of who it is — is apprehensive about taking them on because they fear it will be perceived as anti-Kannada. So, no clear cut orders are given and the police keep waiting," says a senior officer.

The fear factor that Monday has created, most feel, will come in handy when the groups go to collect funds from commercial establishments in the run-up to Karnataka Rajyotsav (Karnataka Formation Day) on 1 November.

The fact is not one but two Bengalurus exist. It suits everyone to showcase only the magnificent Vidhana Soudha, MG Road, Commercial Street and Electronic City as the real Bengaluru. Unfortunately, it also survives cheek-by-jowl with its seedy Siamese twin, which thrives on divisiveness and rancour.

So the "this is not the Bengaluru I know" line is only for those who ignored these faultlines that exist in Karnataka's capital, like in any other developing city. Time for the political and police leadership to draw the Laxman rekha and tell these troublemakers of Bengaluru — This far and no further.

India: Why did Bengaluru burn?

livemint.com - Sep 19 2016

by R. Sukumar
Tamil Nadu-bound buses in flames after they were torched by pro-Karnataka activists during a protest over the raging Cauvery water row in Bengaluru last Monday. Photo: PTI

In the early 2000s, soon after Infosys Ltd had built an impressive, and expansive, new wing of its campus in Bengaluru’s Electronics City, I met the company’s then chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy.

As we walked around the campus, talking of business and people, and the brightly coloured umbrellas stacked in the reception of almost every building, he pointed to a couple of the company’s housekeeping staff in their brown uniforms. They were from nearby slums and low-income neighbourhoods, Murthy said, and it was important that they believed they were sharing in Infosys’s growth. I worry about what would happen if they didn’t, he added.

He and I knew the answer even then, and India and the world, last Monday, when the city burnt for a few hours. By numbers alone (one dead, around 100 buses burnt, Rs.20,000 crore of productivity and business losses to companies), the violence the city saw wasn’t significant—a sign of the troubled times in which we live—but it was almost as if, for a few hours, someone had peeled back the motherboard of India’s own Silicon Valley, and shown us the ugliness beneath. [. . .]

FULL TEXT: http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/crNfAzYcEHdtLQovz24tTP/Why-did-Bengaluru-burn.html

Assam 2012: The Story of a Riot [between Bodos and Bengali-speaking Muslims] (Rahul Bhattacharya)

by Rahul Bhattacharya
Rahul Bhattacharya is the author of Pundits from Pakistan and The Sly Company of People Who Care

When the blood dried in the leafy remoteness of the Northeast, the truth remained as elusive as the perpetrators. An investigation of the ethnic eruption in Assam 2012

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/india/assam-2012-the-story-of-a-riot#page9

India: Haryana government must take strict action against apathetic officials for Jat riots (Edit, The Times of India, June 1, 2016)

State of chaos: Haryana government must take strict action against apathetic officials for Jat riots
June 1, 2016, 2:00 am IST TOI Edit in TOI Editorials | Edit Page, India | TOI

The shocking indictment by the three-member Prakash Singh committee – of top IAS and IPS officials in the Haryana government – for utter dereliction of duty during the Jat riots calls for speedy justice. The government must make the report public and hand out exemplary punishment to the guilty. Chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar has suspended a total of 20 officers (4 IPS, 3 IAS, 3 SDMs and 10 DSPs) of the 90 mentioned in the report, but he needs to go further to stem the rot in the system.

Almost 30 people lost their lives and large-scale destruction of public and private property took place when the Jat community agitation demanding reservation in backward classes turned violent during February 19-22. Officers who shirked their duty must be held accountable and punishment must go beyond just cursory suspensions. The sheer scale of administrative dysfunction exposed by the report is frightening. The then DGP and ACS (Home) reportedly failed to produce a single written order issued to the administration on procedures to be followed during the horrific riots. Apathy was such that even the standard practice of having a state control room during the riots was not followed. Even more disturbing are “credible complaints” against local officers for misleading the army on the whereabouts of violence-hit areas on a number of occasions.

Witnesses have also told media about women commuters being dragged into the fields and gang-raped on the national highway near Murthal on February 22-23. The initial status report filed by Haryana police denied such incidents, but following media reports the high court took suo moto notice. The breach of Delhi’s main source of water, Munak canal, by agitators on February 21 points to grave security threats to crucial infrastructure. The government needs to take necessary steps to safeguard important installations against all forms of threat.

There is a tendency among our political class to describe riots as expressions of spontaneous anger. The truth is that such calamitous incidents only take place when the rule of law is suspended; mobs get galvanised when they sense complicity in police. This violent agitation in the national capital’s backyard should also serve as a timely reminder for the executive to pay heed to the Supreme Court and implement its 2006 police reforms order. A government’s primary responsibility is to uphold rule of law; not to do so is to become a failed state.

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-editorials/state-of-chaos-haryana-government-must-take-strict-action-against-apathetic-officials-for-jat-riots/

India - 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots: A strategic omission of inquiry (Mohammad Ali)

The March 11, 2016

A strategic omission of inquiry

• Mohammad Ali

The Hindu

A file photo of tents at a relief camp for riot victims at Bassi Kalan in Muzaffarnagar.

The Vishnu Sahai Commission serves its political purpose, pinning the blame for the Muzaffarnagar riots on a district officer and exonerating the political leadership

Commissions of inquiry into communal violence in India rarely end up indicting culprits but there are some like the Srikrishna Commission report on the Bombay riots of 1992-93 which at least present a surgical account of the state’s complicity and wilful ignorance by its agencies in preventing violence. The report of the Justice (retd.) Vishnu Sahai Inquiry Commission, set up to probe into the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, and tabled in the State Assembly on Sunday, does neither.

If there is one thing the report clearly does though, it is to completely exonerate the Samajwadi Party (SP) government despite the failure of the top leadership of the government to prevent and control the riots, one of the worst episodes of communal violence in recent memory. The 700-page account of the violence, prepared by the retired justice of the Allahabad High Court over a period of over two years, squarely blames intelligence failure and laxity on the part of administrative officials for the riots which claimed 62 lives and resulted in the displacement of over 60,000 people in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts of Uttar Pradesh.

The commission scrutinised the actions of 40 officials and names four of them — then Principal Secretary (Home) R.M. Srivastava, then Circle Officer Jansath Jagat Ram Joshi, then Muzaffarnagar District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma and then Muzaffarnagar Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Subhash Chandra Dubey. However, it holds the then Local Intelligence Unit (LIU) Inspector Prabal Pratap Singh responsible, citing his failure to give correct intelligence inputs on the mahapanchayat held in Nagla Mandaur on September 7, 2013 which triggered the violence. The mahapanchayat was attended by 40,000-50,000 people, while intelligence inputs claimed that 15,000-20,000 people would be in attendance, the single-member commission said. “The Inquiry Commission has held that prima facie the main responsibility for the riots goes to Prabal Pratap Singh. Hence there will be departmental action against him,” says the 14-page action taken report submitted by the State government in the Assembly.

Clean chit to politicians

The Justice Sahai report gives the Akhilesh Yadav government a clean chit despite listing the reasons for the riots which directly indicate its abdication of responsibility. Even when the report highlights the laxity on the part of some top officials, it shies away from connecting the last few dots leading to the Chief Minister’s door. For instance, the report lists 14 reasons which led to communal polarisation and riots after the deaths of three young men, Shahnawaz, Gaurav and Sachin, in Kawal village of Muzaffarnagar on August 27, 2013.

The second most prominent reason, the report says, was the transfer of the then District Magistrate of Muzaffarnagar Surendra Singh and then SSP Manzil Saini just before the riots. “Their transfers resulted in antagonising the Hindu community (specially Jats) against the government and this antagonism was a major reason for the riots,” says the report, choosing to gloss over the fact that Mr. Yadav also holds the Home portfolio. It also says that the release of 14 Muslim youth who were not named in the FIR relating to the murders of Gaurav and Sachin, was seen as an attempt by the government to favour the Muslim community.

The report virtually gives a clean chit to politicians of all hues, including saffron. It talks extensively about the role of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Sangeet Som in uploading a video on social media — showing some youth being brutally killed in Afghanistan — and falsely linking it to the death of two Jat men, but does not recommend more charges against him than have already been pressed. The intention, it appears, is to deny any fresh ammunition to the BJP to bring Muzaffarnagar back into the political discourse. This, after ruling party realised that its strategy of playing along with the BJP in polarising western U.P. has not helped much, its candidate having lost in the recent Muzaffarnagar bypoll.

The government’s pre-emptive ploy seems to have worked somewhat. BJP leaders in Muzaffarnagar this reporter spoke to didn’t quite know how to react to the report’s findings. One of the main organisers of the Nagla Mandaur mahapanchayat called it a “bakwaas (nonsensical)” report.

With acquittals already happening in the riot-related cases amid allegations of pressure on witnesses to turn hostile, the victims were not expecting any radical justice from the report. But its denial of what thousands of men and women witnessed — the political ambition behind the incitement of violence — still shocked many.

Why table the report?

Uttar Pradesh, and its western belt in particular, has been witness to a long history of communal violence — and of inquiry reports into such outbreaks being given a quiet burial, be it the report of the Gyan Prakash Committee constituted to probe the Hashimpura massacre of 1987, in which 42 Muslims were killed by Provincial Armed Constabulary personnel; that of the Ghulam Mohammad Committee that investigated the killing of more than 60 people in Maliyana in 1987; or the report of the Ram Asrey Mishra Committee probing into the killing of 25 men in unprovoked police firing on an unarmed crowd of protesting Muslims in Muzaffarnagar in 1976. Why, then, was the Sahai report tabled? Perhaps because this once, it’s politically convenient for the ruling dispensation to do so, with a year to go for the Assembly elections. Not only because it takes the sting out of the BJP’s polarisation plans but also because, as some local-level SP leaders averred, it will dent the BJP narrative of the ruling party being “pro-Muslim”. The report thus has a political purpose to serve, much like the communal violence it was tasked to probe into did.

mohammad.ali@thehindu.co.in

India: Ground report: How rumours about cow slaughter triggered riots in Mainpuri

Two Muslim men were nearly killed in Uttar Pradesh last week as they skinned a cow that had died of natural causes. Why did a mob attempt to set them afire?
[by] M Rajshekhar
http://scroll.in/article/762036/ground-report-how-rumours-about-cow-slaughter-triggered-riots-in-mainpuri

India: Riot-hit Muslims find solace in Hindu village in Muzaffarnagar district

The Telegraph, 3 February 2014

Riot-hit Muslims find solace in Hindu village
IMRAN AHMED SIDDIQUI
Ram Singh (left), the community elder, speaks at Palda in Muzaffarnagar on Saturday. Picture by Prem Singh

Palda (Muzaffarnagar), Feb. 2: Mehndi Hasan, Roshan Ali and Mohammed Rasheed call Palda a “terrain of peace”.

Theirs are among 450 riot-hit Muslim families that have each bought a small plot in this predominantly Hindu village, looking to settle down among its “kind and generous” people.

Hasan, 45, had fled his home in Qutba, just 3km away, with his wife, five children and parents after rioters ran amok, killing and burning, in the Muslim village on September 7. But the Hindus of Jat-dominated Palda provided shelter to them and another 100-odd Muslim refugees for weeks and months.

“They fought off their own community members who wanted to attack us,” Rasheed said.

After the word spread, and the government’s riot compensation began trickling in, hundreds of Muslims from several relief camps began buying small slices of farmland here — about 150 to 200 square yards each — to build houses.

“We welcome them with open arms,” village elder Ram Singh, 60, told The Telegraph on Saturday.

About 100 of Palda’s 500 households were Muslims; now its population will double and Hindus may lose their majority — something that should have no bearing on everyday life unless someone plays mischief.

“We want to send a strong message to political parties that are trying to divide people for votes,” Ram Singh said, drawing claps from the Hindus and Muslims sharing a charpoy with him.

But Palda should not be simplified as a feel-good story. The village stands out in a belt blighted by fear and suspicion since the September violence, which killed over 50 people in the neighbouring districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli.

Palda’s experience till now suggests integrated neighbourhoods, not ghettoised compartments, are the best protection for both communities.

But Palda’s solitary status underscores the challenge before integration. Of the 50,000 riot-displaced, at least 15,000 are still too afraid to leave the relief camps. Of the rest, at least half have relocated to relatives’ villages or other Muslim-dominated settlements, often with help from minority organisations, leaving the region largely ghettoised.

“But Palda has become a riot-free terrain of peace (danga-mukt shanti kshetra) for us. The Hindus here are very nice and, thanks to them, many Muslim families are alive today,” said Rasheed, a former inmate of the Shahpur relief camp, 3km away, who bought his piece of Palda a month ago.

He has now pitched a tent and lives in it with his family. “We feel very safe here,” he said. “My new neighbours have been offering us food for the past one month. I’ll soon begin building my house.”

Willy-nilly, strife has become an economic factor, too.

Most of the 450 families of settlers, whom Ram Singh calls the village’s “guests”, are among the 1,000-odd households that have received the Rs 5 lakh compensation announced by the state government. Thousands more are still waitlisted in what critics cite as the latest example of the Akhilesh Yadav government’s poor handling of the tragedy.

“I bought a small plot in Palda paying Rs 3.5 lakh out of the Rs 5 lakh I got from the government,” said Roshan Ali. “I shall build a small house and live here with my family for the rest of my life.”

A municipal official in Shahpur said these plots were sold at rates up to three times the prices that prevailed before the demand from the riot-displaced rose. He added that this was true also of the towns and Muslim-dominated villages where some of the victims have relocated.

Like most Muslims in the region, the new settlers in Palda were mainly landless farm labourers in their native villages and now plan to work in their Jat neighbours’ fields. The rest — masons and blacksmiths — hope to continue in their earlier professions.

Palda is conscious and proud of its newfound fame. Every evening, a group of young villagers assemble at Singh’s home to provide bulletins on the day’s events in the deeply divided neighbourhood.

On Saturday, the discussions centred on Narendra Modi’s Sunday rally in Meerut, about 45km from Muzaffarnagar.

“We’ll go to the rally; some of our Muslim brothers too have decided to accompany us. We’ll submit a memorandum to Modi asking him to intervene and do something for the common people in the area,” said Raj Kumar Singh.

Those who had gone to the rally hadn’t returned home by late Sunday evening; so it remained unclear whether they had been able to hand the memorandum over.

The mood in villages even a couple of kilometres away throw the bonhomie in Palda into sharp relief.

Biram Singh, an elderly villager in Qutbi, which adjoins Qutba where Hasan and fellow residents were attacked, nurses bitter feelings towards his former Muslim neighbours.

“Some Muslims took loans of several lakhs from many people in our village and fled on the pretext of riots. No Hindu from our village attacked Muslims. We asked them not to leave but they did not heed us and even lodged FIRs against some of us,” Biram said.

“The trust between the two communities is gone,” acknowledged Shabana, 40, a widow who is building a single-room house near the Shahpur relief camp with her government compensation.

She has four children, including a 14-year-old son who has not been to school the past five months.

Shabana said the riot had left behind a legacy of hate among the children and youths of both communities. “We don’t know when the scars will heal and people will start living together again,” the Class IV dropout said.