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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