Why Delhi Police Did Nothing to Stop Attacks on Muslims

NEW DELHI: Forty-six people have been killed, more than 250 injured and four mosques set on fire in the sectarian violence in Delhi that coincided with President trump’s visit to india.

The violence, which lasted over three days and nights and was mostly directed at Muslims in northeastern areas of Delhi, was not surprising. Over the past six years, Prime Minister narendra modi, his colleagues in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, their armies of social media trolls and a vast majority of India’s television networks have consistently been building an atmosphere of hatred, suspicion and violence toward India’s Muslim minority.

The pogrom in Delhi follows in the wake of the discriminatory citizenship law that Mr. Modi’s government passed in December. Indians, especially Muslims, have been protesting the law. Before the killings in Delhi, 19 people were killed when protests broke out in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, which is administered by the B.J.P.

In recent elections in Delhi, Mr. Modi’s party ran a dangerously sectarian campaign. Its leaders equated the protests against the citizenship law with treason and called for the murder of protesters. The B.J.P. lost the Delhi elections and the protests continued. On Feb. 23, Kapil Mishra, a leader of the B.J.P., incited mobs in northeast Delhi to remove a group of Muslim women who were holding a sit-in and blocking a road to protest the citizenship law. Violence erupted soon after.

A week later, the detailed accounts of violence raise fundamental questions about the role played by the Delhi police in abetting the Hindu mobs and targeting Muslims. When Mr. Mishra gave the speech that lit the fire, Ved Prakash, the deputy commissioner of police for northeast Delhi, stood beside him and did not intervene. The next day, as the mobs swung into action, Mr. Prakash and other police officers were shaking hands with a Hindu mob, which shouted slogans celebrating the Delhi police and its support.

Top police officers casually expressed their support of the Hindu mobs and their fear of Muslims. “Jai Shree Ram,” the old devotional chant praising the Hindu deity Ram, has been adopted as a war cry by the Hindu nationalist mobs in the past three decades. There were reports of the Delhi police personnel charging at Muslim neighborhoods while shouting, “Jai Shree Ram!”

A particularly gruesome video, which has been fact-checked and verified, shows Delhi policemen standing around five badly injured Muslim men lying on the road, forcing them to sing the national anthem. They can be heard hurling abuses. One of the men has died of his injuries.

Similar behavior by the Delhi police was visible before last week’s violence. On January 30, a gunman opened fire on protesters at Shaheen Bagh in southeast Delhi. Photographs and videos from the site show an armed man facing the protesters, leisurely taking his aim as lackadaisical Delhi policemen stand and watch in the background.

This partisan behavior of the Delhi police is not simply a question of the police reflecting the biases of the population they are recruited from. It is an active compliance with the kind of conduct they believe will be rewarded by Mr. Modi’s government and the ruling party. This belief has been reinforced by what has transpired in earlier bouts of large-scale religious violence in India, in particular in the western state of Gujarat in 2002 and in the pogrom in Delhi in 1984 when more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed by Hindu mobs.

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In February 2002, soon after Narendra modi took over as chief minister of Gujarat, a train carrying Hindu religious volunteers was allegedly set on fire in the town of Godhra by a group of Muslims. Fifty-nine people died. Mr. Modi ensured the bodies of the dead were paraded through Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat. Hindu mobs fueled by incendiary rhetoric from leaders of organizations affiliated with Mr. Modi’s party attacked homes and businesses owned by Muslims. Over a thousand people were killed, over 700 of them Muslims.

The Gujarat police faced the same allegations of abetting the rioters or doing nothing to stop the violence against Muslims. A few police officers stood out for ensuring that the violence did not overwhelm the areas under their charge. All of them were transferred shortly afterward by Mr. Modi and his confidant and then Gujarat home minister Amit Shah. In the following years, those upright police officers were harassed by the government.

Every officer serving in the Delhi police today would be well aware of the fate of the police officers in Gujarat. Like the officers in Gujarat, they report directly to the Modi government since Delhi’s status as the national capital ensures policing responsibilities lie in the hands of the federal government. Mr. Modi’s old confidant Mr. Shah is now the federal home minister.

These officers also had the benefit of an experience much closer at hand. In the first week of November 1984, following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, over 3,000 Sikhs were massacred by Hindu mobs in Delhi. The role of the police came under widespread scrutiny and a government-appointed commission concluded: “There is enough material on record to show that at many places, the police had taken away their arms or other articles with which they could have defended themselves against the attacks by mobs. … After they were persuaded to go inside their houses on assurances that they would be well-protected, attacks on them had started.”

A subsequent commission indicted 72 police officers and recommended that action against them be taken by an agency other than the Delhi police. The recommendation was never acted upon.

Many of the police personnel and officers who were attacking protesters last week in Delhi along with the Hindu mobs would have either served under or been trained under the very same officers who escaped any punishment for their role in the 1984 pogrom.

And the message from Mr. Modi’s government is consistent and clear and goes beyond the police: Justice S. Muralidhar, a Delhi High Court judge who sharply criticized the police and ordered the Delhi police to investigate the role of the Hindu nationalist politicians, was swiftly transferred to a court in a different state.

While the decision to transfer him was already in place, the timing was of the Modi government’s choosing. A lawyer explained that it is unprecedented that a judge is posted elsewhere while he or she is in the middle of hearing such an important subject.

The message is not lost on anyone. A majoritarian government backed by a huge mandate is not going to let judicial or bureaucratic precedents stand in the way of carrying out its agenda.

The police personnel who are accountable for the violence will face no legal action. They may have not stood by the Constitution, but they did stand by the B.J.P. When Hindu mobs next target a Muslim in any part of the country administered by Mr. Modi’s party, we can be sure that no police will stand in their way.

By Hartosh Singh Bal

Mr. Bal is the political editor of The Caravan magazine in New Delhi.

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modi’s india Is Racing to a Point of No Return

Delhi: indian culture may be ancient, but its unity is rare and recent. A growing hostility to Muslims threatens to upend the world’s largest democracy.

The sectarian carnage that ravaged Delhi for three days last week did not erupt in a void. It flared out of a relentless campaign to draw blood.

The indian capital looked besieged long before a stone was hurled or a house torched. Since last December, Delhi has been the center of a national uprising to reclaim the country from Prime Minister narendra modi’s Hindu-first politics. The demonstrations emerged as a response to the government’s amendment of existing legislation to grant expedited citizenship to religious minorities from three neighboring countries—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—where Islam is the state religion. The exclusion of Muslims from the law’s purview introduced by stealth a religious test of citizenship in a constitutionally secular republic, even though the law does not on its own threaten the citizenship of Indians.

But what really lit the fuse under accumulating fears and resentments were the pledges by amit shah—india’s home minister and modi’s closest confidant—to compile a National Register of Citizens (NRC) that could compel all inhabitants of the country to furnish documentary evidence of their nationality. If and when the NRC is activated, those unable to be entered into it can—so long as they are Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, or Zoroastrians who arrived in the country before 2015—evade the detention camps currently under construction by invoking the amended citizenship law to apply for formal citizenship. Only Muslims, the sole major Indian religious community omitted from the citizenship law, would be faced with the ordeal of internment and statelessness for failing to produce the paperwork necessary for inclusion in the NRC.

In the countrywide protests provoked by modi and Shah, a small sit-in by burqa-clad women in a Muslim neighborhood of Delhi ornamented with Indian flags and portraits of mahatma gandhi and bhimrao ambedkar, the chief drafter of india’s constitution, became the nucleus of the most sustained interfaith challenge to their authority. But the government did not dismantle the protest site, because its presence was seen to be as working to the government’s advantage. Campaigning for local elections last month in Delhi, modi’s bharatiya janata party (bjp) attempted to mobilize voters by casting dissenters as traitors. One fevered December evening in the run-up to the vote, the Delhi police, which reports directly to Shah, stormed the library of Jamia Millia Islamia—a university co-founded by Zakir Husain, a Muslim freedom fighter who rose to become the third president of independent India—and beat up student protesters sheltering there. Another afternoon, a minister in modi’s government whipped up a rally with a grisly chant that culminated in “shoot the traitors.”

The BJP lost the election. But Delhi was about to be reduced to a powder keg. The match was tossed by a recently defeated BJP politician who vowed, in the presence of a police officer, to clear out peaceful Muslim protesters massed in northeast Delhi the evening before U.S. President Donald Trump landed in India for a whirlwind 36-hour state visit. Nobody knows who flung the first stone. But blood began spilling that night. And over the next three days, outlying areas of India’s capital collapsed under the worst Muslim-Hindu violence in decades as mobs rampaged through mixed neighborhoods, torching houses, vandalizing places of worship, lobbing Molotov cocktails into homes, and slaughtering people for belonging to the wrong religion.

The number of dead currently stands at 48. But the savagery was by no means symmetrical. Muslims, in a city where they constitute a tiny minority, outnumber Hindu fatalities by three to one. There were courageous exceptions, but there is footage showing uniformed agents of the state openly abetting Hindus against Muslims. In one neighborhood, an elderly Muslim woman choked to death when her house was set on fire. In another, a Muslim man was burned alive in front of his family. The Hindu dead—one stabbed to death hundreds of times and dumped in a drain—are now paraded as exhibits in a propaganda campaign by the prime minister’s ideological fellow travelers that seeks to paint the slaughter as a jihad hatched by seditious Muslims and their secular conspirators.

But what happened in Delhi was the preamble to a full-blown pogrom of Muslims. And more than human lives were lost in it: Trust built up over decades between communities also went up in smoke. The detritus will be cleared and the houses rebuilt, but many who until recently had lived cheek by jowl will for generations regard each other with hostility and suspicion. For ordinary people, this is the upshot of the schismatic politics purveyed by India’s current rulers.

Although modi has personally eschewed explicitly divisive rhetoric since being lofted into the prime minister’s office, surrogates in his party adopting poisonous speeches as the route to instant political glory are only following in the footsteps of their leader. Back in 2007, when he was still persona non grata in much of the world for presiding over the slaughter of nearly a thousand Muslims in 2002 as the chief minister of Gujarat, modi roused a crowd of wealthy Hindu voters by ridiculing liberal protests against the extrajudicial execution of a Muslim prisoner on his watch. “If AK-57 [sic] rifles are found at the residence of a person,” he told the crowd, “you tell me what I should do: should I not kill them?” The audience yelled back in unison: “Kill them! Kill them!”

As he plotted his ascent to national power, Modi’s reputation was deodorized by India’s biggest tycoons, who, in return for expedited clearances for their projects, anointed him the savior of the country. modi’s reign as prime minister is a reprise, on a larger scale, of his rule as chief minister of Gujarat. Instead of development, there is only the mirage of development. The so-called smart cities he conjured up in his speeches are nowhere to be seen, and the man who hypnotized young voters in 2014 with the promise to create 10 million jobs now oversees the worst unemployment crisis in 45 years. Independent institutions—from the media to the courts—have been subverted. India now has a surfeit of jobless young men permanently on edge, a state machinery that is imploding under the authoritarian weight of the prime minister, and a craven judiciary that refuses to rein him in.

Yet if modi remains the most popular leader in India, it is because he has stoked and weaponized Hindu rage. Survey the past, for a moment, from the perspective of newly politically conscious Hindus. Their land is repeatedly invaded for centuries. Their liturgical heritage is methodically razed. And their sacred geography is ultimately amputated to accommodate the demands of Muslim nationalism in the form of Pakistan—a state where Hindus, like all other minorities, have been accorded the status of second-tier citizens in law and are often forcibly converted to Islam. These grievances cannot be brushed aside, or censored, or dismissed with scholarly putdowns that deny the historical memory and experience of a people. History demands resolution. Yet that resolution cannot come from fights on the streets, and a wound that clamors for the blood of fellow citizens to heal itself deserves to be cauterized, not nursed. India cannot survive if it degenerates into a platform for the periodic airing of homicidal Hindu self-pity.

India, of course, has endured other episodes of communal bloodletting in its history. For much of the 1980s, a government led by the nominally secular Indian National Congress party brutalized Sikhs in Punjab. Today, Punjab is ruled by a Congress government headed by a Sikh chief minister. India has a tremendous gift for recovery. But this quality is often mistaken for a limitless capacity to absorb horrors. Muslims are not Sikhs, who make up just 2 percent of the Indian population: There are 200 million Muslims in India. #FP

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12 Bangladeshi Injured in Rally against indian extremist hindu prime minister modi

DHAKA, Bangladesh: At least 12 people were injured in Bangladesh at a protest against the upcoming visit of indian extremist hindu prime minister narendra modi, according to eye witnesses and local police.

The casualties included four policemen from a clash with protesters on Wednesday night in the southern island of Hatiya.

Hundreds of protesters on the remote island blocked a busy road and chanted slogans against the modi government which is widely viewed as anti-Muslim, due to recent riots in the indian capital New Delhi that killed at least 47 people.

“Police came to the spot and asked people to vacate. But protesters carried on the demonstrations against the massacre of Muslim in the indian capital, Delhi,” Iftikhar Hossain a local told Anadolu Agency.

“At one stage police baton-charged the protesters, who retaliated with brick bats and stones,” he added.

modi is due in Bangladesh on March 17 to mark the 100th birth anniversary of the country’s Present PM's father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Local police confirmed four of their officers were injured and hospitalized.

“We requested them to leave the busy road, but they did not listen. Instead, they hurled brick bats at us,” Abul Khayer, the local police chief, told Anadolu Agency over the phone.

He added that police have started investigating the incident.

The Bangladeshi government has come under criticism for sending an invitation to modi, with opposition parties condemning the recent killings in Delhi during communal riots.

Meanwhile, a platform of 46 Islamic organizations in the country -- dubbed as the Islamic Law Implementation Council -- also called on Dhaka to withdraw the invitation to the indian prime minister.

The group also announced countrywide demonstrations after Friday prayer in demand to protest the "anti-Muslim violence" in New Delhi.

At least 47 people, majority of them Muslims, were killed -- with bodies fished out of drains in the week-long riots which started in late February. #AA

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PM Imran thanks Iran's supreme leader, Erdogan for condemning India's oppression of Muslims

Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday thanked Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for speaking up against the "oppression and massacre" of Muslims in India and residents of Indian-occupied Kashmir.

Taking to Twitter, the premier regretted that only a "few voices" from the Muslim world were speaking out to condemn the actions of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Hindu supremacist" regime.

"Sadly, few voices from the Muslim World are speaking out & condemning this; & more voices are being raised in the West condemning the Hindu Supremacist Modi regime's massacre of Muslims in India & Kashmiris in IOJK," he wrote.

The prime minister's statement came in response to a tweet by Khamenei in which he urged India earlier in the day to “confront extremist Hindus” and “stop the massacre of Muslims”, adding to the international fallout over deadly violence targeting Muslims in New Delhi.

At least 44 people were killed and hundreds injured in the worst communal riots in the Indian capital in decades, triggered by clashes between supporters of a new citizenship law and those against it.

“The hearts of Muslims all over the world are grieving over the massacre of Muslims in India,” Khamenei said in a tweet in English, just days after New Delhi rebuked Iran's foreign minister for commenting on the same issue.

"The government of India should confront extremist Hindus & their parties & stop the massacre of Muslims in order to prevent India’s isolation from the world of Islam," he added. The tweet was accompanied by the hashtag #IndianMuslimslnDanger.

“Iran condemns the wave of organised violence against Indian Muslims,” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had tweeted on Monday, in response to which New Delhi summoned the Islamic Republic's ambassador and lodged a protest.

“We do not expect such comments from a country like Iran,” foreign ministry spokesman Raveesh Kumar said in a statement later.

The Citizenship Amendment Act provides non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan a fast track to Indian citizenship.

Prime Minister modi's hindu nationalist government says this is required to help minorities from those mainly Muslim countries.

Critics argue the law discriminates against Muslims and violates the spirit of India's secular constitution. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken part in protests since December.

Earlier this week, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights filed an intervention application in the Indian Supreme Court against the citizenship law.

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Saudi empties Makkah Shareef's Grand Mosque for 'sterilization'

Saudi Arabia on Thursday emptied the Kaaba Shareef, Islam's Sacred site, for sterilization over fears of the new coronavirus, an unprecedented move after the kingdom suspended the year-round Umrah pilgrimage.

State television relayed stunning images of an empty white-tiled area surrounding the Kaaba Shareef - inside Makkah Shareef's Grand Mosque, which is usually packed with tens of thousands of pilgrims.

The move was a “temporary preventive measure” but the upper floors of the Grand Mosque were still open for prayers, a Saudi official told AFP. He called the measure “unprecedented”.

On Wednesday, the kingdom halted the Umrah pilgrimage for its own citizens and residents.

The move came after authorities last week suspended visas for the Umrah and barred citizens from the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council from entering Makkah Shareef and Madina Shareef.

Saudi Arabia on Thursday declared three new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of reported infections to five.

The decision to suspend the Umrah comes ahead of the holy fasting month of Ramazan starting in late April, which is a favored period for pilgrimage.

It is unclear how the coronavirus will affect the Haj, due to start in late July.

Some 2.5 million faithful traveled to Saudi Arabia from across the world in 2019 to perform the Haj.

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'Incredible India' now being viewed as intolerant India, says Pak FM Qureshi

Pakisthani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Thursday stated that 'Incredible India' is now being viewed as "intolerant India", and 'Shining India' as "burning India", adding that the country is now facing international scrutiny like never before.

The foreign minister expressed these views while speaking at a seminar, organised by the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies, in Islamabad.

During his address, Qureshi stated: "Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's policies are taking a bloody and dangerous turn, as predicted by Prime Minister Imran Khan."

Referring to the country's contentious bill that sparked deadly riots in the Indian capital, he said: "India's Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens are aimed at disenfranchising the country's 200 million Muslims."

Referring to the 2002 riots in Gujarat, Qureshi said: "The pogrom of Gujarat is being replayed on the streets of New Delhi. This is a matter of deep concern to Pakistan and should be to the entire world. Hindutva and its capture of Indian state institutions poses the single, gravest threat to global and regional peace and security.

"Pakistan has not sought conflict with India, but we have not appeased either. We have not shied away from lending our full voice and support to the beleaguered people of occupied Kashmir. We have not shied away from exposing the real Indian intent and agenda to the world.

"Today, after decades of hiatus, the Kashmiri issue is fully alive and internationalised. The world's opinion is turning in favour of the Kashmiris, and against ruling Hindu supremacists.

"We have no doubt that the world community can clearly see the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] government in India for what it is; an ideologically driven, hate-filled, majoritarian clique that is destroying the societal fabric, and deeply hurting minorities, especially Muslims.

"They must be held accountable for the crimes against humanity they are committing everyday," he said.

The foreign minister also stated that Pakistan remains committed to its core objective of lowering tensions and promoting peace and stability in the region, Radio Pakistan reported.

Pakistan will not become involved in any regional conflict and will continue to support negotiated settlements of all regional disputes, the report quoted him as saying.

"Dialogue is the only viable option to bring peace and stability to the region," he added. #Dawn

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Trump talks to Taliban leader for 35 minutes

KABUL: President Donald Trump spoke by phone to the leader of the Taliban, the militant group and the US leader said on Tuesday, days after Washington signed a historic deal with the militants.

Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House, said he had “a very good talk with the leader of the Taliban”, without naming him.

The 35-minute call came a day after the militants ended a partial truce and threw into doubt peace talks between Kabul and the militants that are due to begin on March 10, according to the US-Taliban agreement signed on Saturday.

A transcript of the phone call released by the Taliban quoted fighter-turned-negotiator Mullah Baradar urging Trump to “take determined actions in regard to the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan”.

Under the terms of the US-Taliban agreement, foreign forces will quit Afghanistan within 14 months, subject to Taliban security guarantees and a pledge by the insurgents to hold talks with Kabul.

Taliban attack Afghan army bases, throwing peace talks into doubt

But a dispute over a prisoner swap has raised questions about whether the negotiations between Kabul and the Taliban will go ahead.

The agreement includes a commitment to exchange 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government in return for 1,000 captives — something the militants have cited as a prerequisite for talks but which President Ashraf Ghani has refused to do before negotiations start.

Baradar called on Trump to “not allow anyone to take actions that violate the terms of the agreement thus embroiling you even further in this prolonged war”, according to the Taliban transcript.

Apparent differences between the Doha agreement and a joint US-Afghan declaration released in Afghanistan underline the obstacles facing negotiators.

The US-Taliban deal committed to the release of prisoners while the Kabul document only required both sides to determine “the feasibility of releasing” captives.

Since the deal signing, the Taliban have been publicly claiming “victory” over the US.

Taliban attacks

The Taliban carried out dozens of attacks on Afghan army bases, officials said on Tuesday, hours after ending a partial truce and throwing into doubt peace talks between Kabul and the insurgents.

In the last 24 hours the Taliban conducted 33 attacks in 16 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, interior ministry spokesman Nasrat Rahimi said.

“As a result, six civilians were killed and 14 wounded. Eight enemy were also killed, 15 wounded,” he said on Twitter.

Two soldiers were killed in one of the attacks in southern Kandahar province, a government statement said.

An attack in Logar province near Kabul killed five security forces, the provincial governor’s spokesman Didar Lawang said.

The halt to the limited truce, which began on February 22, ends what was a welcome reprieve for ordinary Afghans who have borne the brunt of the deadly violence. But experts said the move was unsurprising as both sides seek to exploit whatever leverage they hold to force the other’s hand.

“Of course violence will go up, was bound to happen. No surprise Ghani balking on prisoner release: one of his few levers,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tweeted. Kabul-based analyst Ahmad Saeedi said the uptick in attacks reflected the insurgents’ belief that “they have to keep the battlefield hot to be able to win on the negotiating table, as they did with the Americans”.

“After the US-Taliban deal, it is illogical to fight. It is time for peace,” said Naqibullah, a 40-year-old government emplo­yee in Kabul, who uses only one name. “The Taliban can’t take the whole nation hostage.”

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2020

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