The Tragedy of Babri Masjid and Some Truth About Hindustan | Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi

 

Is India’s Hindu majority radicalized against Muslims?

 

“Hum unka murder bhi na karen “Can’t we even murder them (Muslims)?” These were the words of Suraj Pal Amu, president of an Indian far-right outfit Karni Sena, while addressing an audience of 50,000 at a Mahapanchayat (great council) in the north-Indian state of Haryana on May 30. The council was held in support of the accused arrested for lynching a Muslim man in Mewat, Haryana.

On May 16, a 25-year-old Muslim youth Asif Khan from Mewat’s Khalilpur Kheda village was lynched allegedly by a mob. Asif was returning home after buying medicines.

“Unhone bola ‘Mulleh, tum logo mein se ek ko bhi nahi chhodenge,’ aur ye bhi bola ‘tum sab se hum Jai Shri Ram bulvayenge’ (They said they will not leave any of us alive and also said they will make us chant Jai Sri Ram),” the Quint quoted Asif’s cousin Rashid, an eyewitness, as saying.

When the police arrested the accused in the ‘lynching case’, people from a certain section of the Hindu society opposed their arrest. This is not the first time when some sections of the Hindu majority community in India supported people accused of committing crimes against Muslims, India’s largest religious minority.

This incident, and similar incidents like this, illustrate that India is following the path of Nazi Germany where the majority of Germans were radicalized to the extent that they blindly supported the holocaust against the Jews. In Nazi Germany, Jews were dehumanized by Hitler’s propaganda machinery. They were called ‘cockroaches.’ Using such kind of genocidal terminology is the first step towards genocide. Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers, it started with hate speeches.

When a section of the society is dehumanized, the other groups of the society become apathetic towards them. The perfect example of this was how German society supported Nazis and their actions, which killed millions of Jews.

I can see the same pattern being replicated in India. Muslims in India are being dehumanized and the majority of Hindu society has become mute spectators. The right-wing Hindu politicians and a large section of Indian Media continuously target Muslims. This leads to the dehumanizing of Muslims in the social sphere and they are, in turn, treated as the second class citizens of India.

The pattern of this dehumanization can be seen in various ways.

Since ultra-Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, several Muslims were lynched by Hindu extremist mobs in different incidents across the country. Following these incidents of violence against the Muslims, those Hindu extremists who were involved in these heinous crimes received support from certain section of the majority community, and in turn, exposing the deep-seated bigotry of the majority society.

Just a week after Modi took oath as Prime Minister of India in 2014, a Muslim techie named Mohsin Shaikh was lynched in Pune, Maharashtra by members of a far-right Hindu outfit called Hindu Rashtra Sena. The accused Dhananjay Desai was released on bail and received a heroic welcome from his supporters.

In 2017, a Muslim daily wage worker named Afrazul was brutally beaten up and burnt alive on live camera in Rajsamand, Rajasthan. A Hindu man Shambhu Lal Regar, who committed this heinous crime, was hailed as a hero. His supporters attacked a local court in Rajasthan and hoisted a saffron flag on top of it. Within three days, his supporters had collected Rs 2,75,000 ($3,767). Moreover, on the occasion of a Hindu festival, people made a tableau of Regar and used it in a parade.

In another incident, Alimuddin Ansari was lynched in Jharkhand on June 29, 2017. His killers got bail from the court and Modi’s ministerial colleague, Jayant Sinha garlanded them. In a BBC interview, Sinha even admitted that BJP leaders had provided legal expenses to the accused in the case.

In 2018, an 8-year-old nomadic Muslim girl was raped and brutally killed inside a temple in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir. The culprits kept her in captivity for several days, sedated her and raped her multiple times and later killed her.

When police arrested some accused in the case, a Hindu Right Wing organization called Hindu Ekta Manch took out a march in support of the accused. The rally was attended by BJP ministers.

BJP leaders not only support these criminals but also deliver anti-Muslim hate speeches to fuel Islamophobia in the country.

For example, in 2016, Anant Kumar Hegde, a BJP leader had said “Islam should be wiped out from this world.”

In the Mahapanchayat (great council) held in Haryana on May 30 to support the alleged killers of a Muslim man Asif Khan, approximately 50,000 people attended the event and several local BJP leaders had also joined it. The council cannot be seen in isolation, as this was not the only event that took place in Mewat in support of the murder accused. Many such small panchayats were held in different villages of Mewat before this Mahapanchayat.

These incidents are enough to expose the deep-seated anti-Muslim hatred prevailing in the majority community of India. The radicalization of the Hindu majority has happened to such an extent that they are openly taking out rallies in support of the people accused of violence against Muslims, and which include rapists and murderers as well.

This radicalized lot is openly calling for the killing of Muslims because they are confident that the government will not take any action against them. These radicalized speakers are aware that the more hatred they will spew against Muslims, the more their popularity will grow among their supporters.

Hindu Nationalists in India understand the anti-Muslim psyche of the society. It is one of the main reason that they do not shy away from spewing hatred against Muslims. In India, many far-right Hindu leaders proudly accept their involvement in anti-Muslim criminal activities. Their hatred against Muslims makes them more popular in society.

Bhavesh Patel, a convict in Ajmer Dargah Blast 2007, was released on bail in 2018. When he reached his hometown Bharuch, he was a given heroic welcome by a large crowd that included office bearers of BJP and other far-right Hindu outfits.

Pragya Thakur is accused in the Malegaon Bomb blast of 2008. After being released from jail on bail, she contested parliamentary elections on a BJP ticket in 2019 and emerged as a winner by getting 8,66,482 votes. Thakur has confessed on camera that she was involved in Babri mosque demolition in 1992. Yet, this has not mattered for a society where hatred for Muslims is a populist tactic to win elections and wield power.

A year ago, when India was witnessing historical mass protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a few BJP leaders including Kapil Mishra, and their supporters marched on the streets against Muslim protesters and shouted slogans like “Shoot the traitors”.

It is a fact that hate speeches in India always incite people to commit crimes against targeted groups, especially the Muslim minority community. In India, where the polarization of the political sphere has led to a divisive body politic, the otherization of Muslims is key to stay in power.

In another incident last year, a Hindu man Kapil Gujjar fired at Muslims who were protesting against CAA at Shaheen Bagh Delhi. Later on, Kapil was released on bail and joined BJP. Following the outrage, the BJP, however, expelled him.

Few weeks after the shooting incident, anti-Muslim riots took place in North East Delhi in February 2020, in which scores of Muslims were killed and dozens of properties belonging to Muslims were burnt down and many were arrested. However, the leaders who shouted hate-filled slogans and delivered incendiary speeches were never arrested. On the contrary, they became more popular among the masses.

In April 2021, a Hindu priest Narsinghanand organized a press conference where he abused the Prophet of Islam (PBUH). A case was registered against him but he was never arrested. Following the press conference, he became the apple of the eye for Hindu Nationalists. The BJP leader Kapil Mishra raised 4.8 million INR through crowdfunding for Narsinghanand.

Suraj Pal Amu who recently addressed a Mahapanchayat in support of murder accused, has been appointed as spokesperson of BJP. No action has been taken against him yet.

If murder and terror accused are being treated as heroes in a society, then that society can be anything but civilized. Right-wing leaders in India want to spread hated against Muslims because it helps them to gain popularity, and society by and large wants to elect hatemongers because they want to teach a lesson to Muslims.

In the present political landscape of India, the onus of reforming the Hindu society is on the shoulders of well-meaning Hindus who want to defeat this fascism. India needs a social reformer from the majority Hindu community who can deradicalize the Hindu society.

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Love Jihad in India’s Uttar Pradesh

Muslim Family Brutally Attacked By Hindutva Mob

 

Reports have surfaced that a Muslim family was brutally beaten up by a group of men after they barged into their home in Yamna Vihar locality in New Delhi on Friday night. According to an Urdu news portal Roznama Khabrein, 11 family members including children and women were injured in the attack by the gang led by certain Vipin. A delegation of Jamait Ulama-e-Hind met the victims and expressed their solidarity and support with the family of Yamin Khan.

 The report said that the family told the Jamiat delegation that they were attacked for their Muslim identity. Yamuna Vihar was one of the worst hit localities in the riots that shook the national capital last year leaving 53 dead, majority of them Muslims. The family said that even though the iron gate of the lane was shut, Vipin beat up the guard who attempted to resist their forced entry. He and his men then entered into Yamin Khan’s house, beat up family members and misbehaved with women folks.

 After the family dialed the police helpline the goons ran away. Jamiat delegation led by Maulana Hakimuddin Qasmi took up the matter with top police officials of the area including DCP. The police told the delegation that a case has been filed and gang leader Vipin has been nabbed. The police assured them that all the accused will face the law. 

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Meet The Lawyer Fighting 50 Delhi Riot Cases, Almost Half For Free

Abdul Gaffar, a 40-year-old criminal lawyer, is defending close to 50 cases related to the Delhi riots in February, almost half of them for free, but there is another communal riot from seven years ago that he cannot forget.

In 2013, Gaffar’s elderly uncle was killed by a mob in Muzaffarnagar riots that swept through western Uttar Pradesh.

“The village sarpanch, who is Hindu, rushed over and moved my family to his  house before the mob arrived. But my uncle said, ‘I’m 75-years-old, who will beat me? I have raised all these boys.’ He said, ‘You go and I will stay here.’ The mob entered the house, and hacked him into four or five pieces,” said Gaffar, his voice low and matter-of-fact.

His uncle’s grandson, Gaffar said, is a soldier in the Indian army.

“When you are in the legal field, people expect you to get things done,” Gaffar said. “I called everyone I could think of to inform them of the murder and ask his body be removed, but no one responded. I cannot explain to you how helpless I felt that day.”

In a conversation with HuffPost India at the Karkardooma court, Gaffar, a father to three children, who studied law at DAV College in Muzaffarnagar, said that if the death of his maternal uncle stays with him till today, so do the actions of the Hindu village chief who saved his family from the mob. If most of his clients are Muslim, half the junior lawyers working with him are Hindu.

As a criminal lawyer, he said, he is happy to take on Hindu clients, but a communal riot erodes trust. The families of two Hindu men accused in the riots who had approached him in March, and whose vakalatnama (power of attorney) he obtained, later dispensed of his services.

“I was interested in their case but I did not get the right response from them. I felt they did not trust me,” said Gaffar.

For Gaffar, the Delhi Police’s investigation into the February riots marks a line in the sand.

“The role of the investigating agency is limited to collecting and producing evidence before the court,” Gaffar said. “For the first time, I’m seeing the investigating agency giving its own hypothesis, giving a personal opinion, making assumptions, and trying to set a narrative.”

The chargesheets, Gaffar said, suggest the police was leading with an anti-Muslim narrative that linked the February riots to the preceding months of largely peaceful protests by those opposed the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act. The CAA, its critics say, alters the secular nature of the Indian constitution by making religion the basis for granting citizenship to asylum seekers.

The police have arrested several activists and students who opposed the CAA, while representatives of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who incited crowds and policemen filmed assaulting protestors and destroying property on camera are yet to be brought to account – lending credence to the impression that the police is using the riots as a pretext to target those opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authoritarian government.

The Delhi Police, which reports to Modi’s right hand man, Home Minister Amit Shah, has maintained that it is conducting an “impartial” investigation.”

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‘Tear Them Apart’: How Hindutva WhatsApp Group Demanded Murder, Rape of Muslims in Delhi Riots

At 11:44 pm on February 26, a message sent on a WhatsApp group boasted of the murders of two men. It read: “Tumhare Bhai ne abhi 9 bje k krib b.vihar m 2 mulla mare hai (Your buddy has just killed two mullahs [derogatory word used for Muslims] in Bhagrirathi Vihar at around 9 pm).”

On the morning of February 27, the lifeless bodies of two brothers – Mohammad Aamir and Hashim Ali, aged 30 and 16 – were found in a drain in Bhagirathi Vihar, covered with gory wounds.

The night before, Asghari, their mother, had received a phone call from Aamir. “Paanch minute mein ghar pahunch jayengey (We will be home in five minutes),” he had told her. But he never came home. Neither did his brother. There were communal riots in Delhi at the time. Aamir and Hashim were two among the more than 50 victims of the violence.

Aamir’s eight months pregnant wife and two daughters are now alone. She is still observing her iddat (Islamic period of waiting after being widowed or divorced) and prays all day, every day for justice for Aamir.

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British Muslims held for two months in India claim religious persecution

Eight British Muslims detained in India for more than two months face criminal charges after getting caught up in a court case in which thousands of foreign Muslims are accused of violating the coronavirus lockdown.

The men allege they are victims of religious persecution by the Indian government, which is led by the rightwing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), known for its anti-Muslim agenda. According to a petition filed to Delhi high court on 20 May, their treatment is “tantamount to illegal detention”.

More than 2,500 foreign Muslims, from 35 different countries, are being charged in the case. Last week, the Indian government agreed to release and deport detained foreign Muslims but only if they accepted guilt for visa violations and “wilfully” disobeying lockdown orders.

“We haven’t done anything wrong. We don’t deserve to be treated like this,” said Shamsul, 39, an optometrist from Lancashire who had travelled to Delhi in March to attend an Islamic gathering.

Speaking by phone from the Delhi centre where he is being held, Shamsul added: “When you are locked away like an animal inside a room and you get treated like a piece of dirt, it mentally just breaks you completely.”

The UK Foreign Office has been accused by the men and their families of abandoning its own citizens to prejudice at the hands of the Indian government and of “caring more about diplomatic relations than the appalling human rights violations”.

In a statement, the FCO said: “We are supporting a group of British people detained in India. We are in close contact with prison officials and the Indian authorities to secure consular access for those who remain in detention.”

Most of the detained British citizens had travelled to India to visit the headquarters of a Muslim organisation, Tablighi Jamaat, located in the Delhi neighbourhood of Nizamuddin. They attended a gathering between 10 and 15 March, alongside thousands of Indians and other foreigners.

The day after the gathering ended a notice was issued limiting events in Delhi to 50 people to restrict the spread of Covid-19. Just over a week later, all international flights were grounded and a strict nationwide lockdown was imposed with four hours’ notice. More than a thousand visitors, both Indian and foreign, found themselves stranded in Tablighi Jamaat’s headquarters.

Documents show that Tablighi Jamaat had been given permission to hold the event. Other religious gatherings were still taking place around the country at the same time, including a Hindu religious ceremony in Madhya Pradesh on 20 March attended by 800 people, from where multiple coronavirus cases later emerged.

However, Tablighi Jamaat became embroiled in controversy after it emerged that dozens of attendees at the gathering had contracted coronavirus and then travelled back to towns and villages across India, or stayed in the Nizamuddin headquarters without following physical distancing.

Across India, a public campaign of hate began to build. Driven in part by anti-Muslim sentiment, Tablighi Jamaat was singled out and accused by Delhi police, BJP politicians and the media of not only conspiring to violate lockdown but also encouraging its Muslim congregation to fight “corona jihad” and purposefully spread the virus, something Tablighi Jamaat vigorously denies. Tablighi Jamaat’s leaders were arrested and face charges of culpable homicide and manslaughter for their alleged role in spreading coronavirus.

On 31 March, about 950 foreigners – including at least four British citizens – who were stuck in the Nizamuddin building were rounded up by police. They were told they were being taken into standard coronavirus quarantine.

Shamsul was among those detained. A lifelong follower of Tablighi Jamaat, he was making his first trip to India.

“After lockdown was announced in India I tried to get home but there weren’t any flights and the embassy was no help,” said Shamsul. “So I just stayed in Nizamuddin and when the police took us into quarantine I wasn’t worried. We all presumed it was normal procedure. We didn’t know we would never be allowed to leave.”

According to Shamsul, for the first 50 days the men were locked in their small rooms, shared between three people, for 24 hours a day. He said water regularly cut out for two days at a time, they were given no soap or toilet paper and were fed the same meal of rice and lentils every day, twice a day. He said their passports were taken from them, and then their mobile phones, under the guise of sanitation. When the phones were returned a week later, photos and messages had reportedly been deleted and sim cards were missing.

According to Shamsul’s accounts, and the court petition, the detainees were tested twice for coronavirus, and after the second test were all proved to be negative, but still were not released.

The detainees have since been shifted to more relaxed quarantine centres but remain locked up, and say they still do not have their passports.

At the same time in late March, at least four other British citizens who had been sheltering in mosques and buildings due to lockdown restrictions in other areas of India were arrested. Some had attended the Tablighi Jamaat gathering but had travelled out of Delhi before lockdown. Others were tourists.

Four remain detained, including Mohsin, a British citizen who is being held in a jail in Ranchi, Jharkhand, and another man, Thalha Siddique, from Bradford, who had not attended the Delhi Tabhlighi Jamaat gathering and is being incarcerated in Bhopal jail.

In a recent update given to his family by an FCO caseworker, who was denied permission to see Siddique in person, it was confirmed Siddique had twice tested negative for coronavirus. Siddique asked for the message to be passed to his family in the UK that “he loves them and misses them a lot”.

The men were held for over 50 days with no charges. It was only after a court petition was filed on 20 May, challenging the government for keeping 1,000 foreigners in “illegal detention”, that charge sheets were filed. In court, Delhi police denied the foreigners were even in custody. The case has since been expanded to blanket-charge more than 2,500 foreign Muslims.

“It’s targeting one religious group,” said Ashima Mandla, a lawyer representing the accused foreigners collectively. “Why were they held for two months with no charge, even after they tested negative for coronavirus? It is quite clear that was illegal detention and a clear violation of the constitution and the fabric of liberty.”

The next court date is 25 June. The accused have been charged with disobeying lockdown orders and violating their tourist visas by carrying out religious missionary work, even though no missionary preaching occurred at the Tablighi Jamaat gathering. However, a few days ago, the government added “indulging in Tablighi activities” as a specific tourist visa violation.

The Foreign Office has been accused of negligence by those detained and their families, who say they have had barely any contact from the British embassy except assertions that it cannot interfere in Indian legal matters. They say that letters sent to the office of the foreign secretary and minister for Asia have been ignored.

The wife of another British citizen from London who attended the Tablighi Jamaat event and is being detained in Delhi spoke of her anger and frustration.

“How is it that British citizens have been locked up for two months and the government say there is nothing they can do?” she said. “I find it so upsetting that the Indian government is using this pandemic to target and exploit Muslim people.”

“I can hardly bear it,” she added. “My daughter keeps asking ‘when will dad be coming home’?”

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India's lockdown: Narratives of inequality and Islamophobia

It Was Already Dangerous to Be Muslim in India. Then Came the Coronavirus

The Islamophobic hashtags began circulating shortly after the news broke in late March.

Indian authorities had linked dozens of cases of COVID-19 to a Muslim missionary group that held its annual conference in Delhi in early March, and health officials were racing to track down anyone who had contact with the participants. Coronavirus fears and religious tension were already at a fever pitch in India, and it didn’t take long for the two forces to intermingle. Videos falsely claiming to show members of the missionary group spitting on police and others quickly went viral on social media, exacerbating an already dangerous atmosphere for Muslims. “Islamophobia has been transposed onto the coronavirus issue,” says Amir Ali, an assistant professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Since March 28, tweets with the hashtag #CoronaJihad have appeared nearly 300,000 times and potentially seen by 165 million people on Twitter, according to data shared with TIME by Equality Labs, a digital human rights group. Equality Labs activists say that many of the posts are in clear violation of Twitter’s rules on hate speech and coronavirus, but have yet to be taken down. “We are committed to protect and serve the public conversation as we navigate this unprecedented global public healthcare crisis,” reads a statement Twitter provided to TIME. “We continue to remain vigilant.”


Coming just weeks after religious pogroms conducted by Hindu nationalists left 36 Muslims dead in Delhi, the surge in hateful tweets demonstrates how anxieties over the coronavirus have merged with longstanding Islamophobia in India, at a time when the Muslim minority — 200 million people in a nation of 1.3 billion — feels increasingly targeted by the ruling Hindu nationalists. “One of the key features of anti-Muslim sentiment in India for quite a long time has been the idea that Muslims themselves are a kind of infection in the body politic,” says Arjun Appadurai, a professor of media, culture and communication at New York University who studies Indian politics. “So there’s a kind of affinity between this long-standing image and the new anxieties surrounding coronavirus.”

One of the most popular false #CoronaJihad tweets claims to show a Muslim man from the Delhi congregation intentionally coughing on somebody. The tweet referred to Muslims as “such vile minded people” and listed hashtags including #CoronaJihad and #TablighiJamatVirus, a reference to the religious group that met in Delhi. But the video featured in the viral tweet was actually filmed in Thailand, not India, and there is no proof that the man was a member of the Delhi congregation. Nevertheless, the tweet was still online as of April 3, with more than 4,200 retweets and 503 replies. Another video shared on both Facebook and Twitter purporting to show Muslims intentionally sneezing on each other was debunked by the fact-checking organization AltNews.

Another tweet, which had around 2,000 retweets before it was removed for violating Twitter’s rules, featured a cartoon of a caricatured Muslim man labeled “Corona Jihad” trying to push a Hindu off a cliff. “Corona jihad is this new idea that Muslims are weaponizing the coronavirus to target Hindus,” says Thenmozhi Soundarajan, executive director of Equality Labs. The tweet has since been removed for violating Twitter’s rules, but several other cartoons linking Muslims to the coronavirus, shared by the same account with more than 15,000 followers, were still online as of April 3.

In India, where the politically dominant Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has increasingly launched dogwhistle attacks on Muslims since being reelected with a massive majority in April last year, the coronavirus is just “one more opportunity to cast the Muslim as the other, as dangerous,” says Ali, the professor.


“People are talking about ‘bio jihad’ and ‘corona jihad,’” Ali says. “These are just the latest in a series of different forms of ‘jihad’ that the media has talked about, that have been spread on social media, and that people are gleefully accepting.” Population jihad, for example, is a common trope in Hindu nationalist messaging, claiming that Muslims are trying to turn India into a Muslim nation by reproducing at a faster rate than Hindus. Love jihad is the idea that Muslim men are tricking Hindu women into romantic relationships in order to convert them to Islam. “Corona jihad is the most outrageous one so far, because people are really being infected and dying,” Ali says.

Social media companies have struggled with hate speech for years, embroiling the platforms in a difficult tangle in which freedom of speech runs up against the companies’ responsibility to protect minorities. In the world’s first social media pandemic, hate speech related to the virus is spreading online almost as fast as the virus itself. But recent history demonstrates that inaction on the platforms’ part can allow hate speech to turn into violence. Myanmar’s 2017 genocide perpetrated by Buddhist nationalists against Rohingya Muslims was preceded by a campaign of dehumanizing hate speech on Facebook. Equality Labs’ Soundarajan says social media companies cannot feign ignorance on the issue because her group and others are flagging troublesome content. “They’re aware of it,” says Soundarajan. “Whether they allow it to go viral is now their own responsibility.” (Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TIME.)

Although this pandemic is uncharted territory when it comes to predicting the impact of virus-related hate speech, public health officials have warned against stigmatizing minority groups. Because COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China, some — including the U.S. President — have called it the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” a name that appears to be linked to an uptick in global violence against Asians. In February, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the then-unnamed coronavirus would henceforth be known officially as COVID-19 — a name which purposely did not include a reference to China. “Having a name matters to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the time.

Some are working to prevent fears over the virus from becoming entangled with religious divisions. Sam Brownback, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, is calling on governments to push back “aggressively” against the rising incidents of “blaming of religious minorities for the COVID virus,” including the rise in usage of #CoronaJihad and other hashtags trending in India. “The governments really should put this down, and say very clearly that this is not the source of the Coronavirus,” he said in a conference call with reporters on Thursday. “We know where this virus originated. We know it’s a pandemic the whole world is being subjected to. It’s not something from religious minorities. But unfortunately we are seeing that sort of blame game getting started up in different places around the world.”

In India, activists fear the stigmatization of Muslims could exacerbate the coronavirus crisis. “Launching a witch hunt against the attendees of the Nizamuddin congregation will be counterproductive from the public health point of view,” said several Indian intellectuals in an open letter published Thursday, referring to the area of Delhi where the conference was held. “The attendees should be identified without criminalizing them and put into quarantine as per norms.” The virus, they said, does not care about religious or national differences. “The solution will not come through the pursuit of divisive agendas but through scientific endeavors and human solidarity.”

A final irony of the Tablighi Jamaat controversy — which escalated on April 3 when the Indian government announced some members of the group would be charged under India’s National Security Act for violating quarantine — is that it was just one of myriad religious groups that continued to meet after India unexpectedly announced its coronavirus lockdown, yet it has drawn the vast majority of attention.

“They are no different from any other people in India and around the world who have pushed the envelope in terms of good sense,” Appadurai says of the Tablighi Jamaat congregation. “But of course, India is a very dangerous place for Muslims even apart from the coronavirus. It was asking for just the kind of thing that has now happened.”

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When acid became a weapon: Delhi violence

“It was as if someone threw boiling hot water on me,” said the 23-year-old. He removed his shirt to reveal flesh-coloured scabs that stretched from the right side of his upper back to his right ear and down his right arm. He could not stop himself from scratching the wounds, which itched madly as they healed.

Nearly 20 days after rioting mobs in North East Delhi’s Khajuri Khas area flung acid on him, the pain is still fresh in his mind. “I cried so much,” he said “I do not know what they would have done to me if they caught me.” He is still so fearful he does not want to reveal his name.

From February 23 to 26, violence engulfed neighbourhoods in North East Delhi. What started as a clash between groups protesting against the new Citizenship Amendment Act and those supporting it turned into communal violence, much of it directed against Muslims. At least 53 were killed in the violence and hundreds injured.

For days, hospitals in Delhi were flooded with the dead and the injured. Their injuries told the story of the violence: gunshot wounds, stabs and burns. Some also bore wounds that spoke of acid attacks. At Al Hind Hospital in North East Delhi’s Mustafabad, at least three cases are marked as “acid attack”. Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in Dilshad Garden recorded four such cases, Newslaundry reported.

MA Anwar, founder of Al Hind Hospital, told Scroll.in that the chemical substance used was “strong acid”. He classified some of the injuries sustained by victims as second degree burns. “The body mass melted away and the injuries were very deep,” he said. “Most of these patients still come to change their dressing.”

‘Ammi, my eyes are burning’
At the relief camp set up in the Mustafabad Eidgah, 20-year-old Anam is recovering from her injuries. “It itches more than it hurts,” she said. The lower part of her face and her neck bear scars, acquired when marauding mobs allegedly attacked their house in Shiv Vihar on February 25.

They lived in Gali Number 13 in Shiv Vihar’s Phase 6, down the road from Medina Masjid, which was also desecrated in the violence. The family ran a grocery store from the ground floor of the two-storeyed house. Anam’s mother, 40-year-old Mumtaz Begum, recalls hearing gas cylinders bursting on the main road running through the neighbourhood on February 25. Around 8 pm, Mumtaz recounted, her husband, 52-year-old Mohammad Waqil, went up to the terrace to see if the violence had stopped.

“I told him we should leave but he said, ‘Are you mad? This is our house, we have our family and our goats here – where will we go?’” Mumtaz said. “He said we would leave only after we saw what was happening from the terrace.”

There was no electricity that night, Mumtaz said, so her daughter, her husband and she climbed to the terrace in darkness. As Waqil and Anam looked out from the terrace, she waited inside in the staircase.

Anam said she heard the mobs chanting “Jai Shri Ram!” and Mumtaz said she could see smoke billowing out from houses in the neighbourhood – “there was fire everywhere”. Within minutes, a glass bottle landed on Waqil’s face, spilling acid on his eyes and on Anam’s mouth, chin and neck, Mumtaz said.

“I could not see if the acid came from below or from the front but it was so quick,” Mumtaz said. “We had not even been up there for 10 minutes. It was very sudden.”

Once the acid touched her face, Anam ran towards her mother. “I thought dirt had got into my eye but it was acid,” she said. Her mother wiped the substance off Anam’s face with her scarf. “She kept saying ‘Ammi, my face is burning’,” recalled Mumtaz.

Waqil, however, was rooted to the spot. As Mumtaz went closer, she said, she saw blood oozing from his face. “I could not understand where the blood on his face came from,” she said.

That was when the family, including Anam’s brothers, 18-year-old Mohammad Wasim, 14-year-old Mohammad Naseem and their uncle, Shakeel, decided it was time to leave their home. The six of them and another neighbour began to walk towards Medina Masjid.

The mosque was deserted, save for another neighbour who said he was trapped there, Mumtaz recalled. The family hid in the mosque even as mobs bore down on it, setting gas cylinders alight. Till 2am that night, Mumtaz kept calling the police on 100 but no one answered her calls. Meanwhile, Waqil had fallen silent. In despair, Mumtaz said, she started to pray: “I was praying to Allah to get us out of there safely or bury us along with the debris of the mosque.”

Around 3am, the family decided to venture out of the mosque. A neighbour had called and asked them to reach the main road running through the neighbourhood and walk towards Chaman Park, a Muslim-majority locality nearby. “When we got out, we saw everything was vandalised and burning,” Mumtaz said.

At 5am on February 26, Mumtaz called an ambulance from Chaman Park. It was to take Waqil and Anam to the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital at Delhi Gate. Anam was discharged on February 29. Waqil continues to receive treatment at the hospital.

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DELHI RIOTS: THE AFTERMATH |

'We are not safe': India's Muslims tell of wave of police brutality

“The maulana told the policemen gently that none from the seminary took part in any protest rally and pleaded for them not to vandalise the Qur’an centre in the madrasa,” said a neighbour who witnessed the police attack but did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal. “It was then that the policemen and Rapid Action Force personnel [a branch of the police that deals with crowd control] pounced on him.”

The police then rounded up Hussaini and 35 of his students, 15 of whom were under 18 and mostly orphans, and took them to a nearby police barracks. Here the cleric was, witnesses allege, stripped of his clothes, beaten and a rod shoved up his anus, causing rectal bleeding, while the students were allegedly tortured with bamboo rods and made to shout Hindu nationalist slogans Jai Shri Ram” [Hail Lord Ram] and “Har Har Mahadev” [Save us Lord Shiva].

“The maulana had been beaten up very badly and was left without a single cloth on his body and when he was released we found him in very bad shape,” said Salman Saeed, a local Congress leader who came to pick up Hussaini and several students from Civil Lines Barracks. “He was badly wounded and bloodied, with many bruises across his body. He could not stand up on his legs and was bare-bodied. We were shocked to see the maulana in that condition. He is bed-ridden now.”

While Hussaini and all his underage students were released at 2am that night, 12 adults students and the madrasa cook remain behind bars and have been charged with taking part in violence, despite never partaking in a protest.

The young students were not the only underage Muslim prisoners in Muzaffarnagar police barracks that night. Upon seeing the commotion in the streets, 14-year-old Mohammad Sadiq, who worked as a mason’s assistant, set out to find his 11-year-old brother. Cars and motorcycles had been set alight and as protesters were fleeing around him, he too began to run. It was then that a dozen police pounced on him, hitting his legs with batons to make him fall to the ground and then unleashing a torrent of blows, he said.

“The police said to me, ‘if you tell us the names of 100 Muslims involved in the riots we will stop beating you’,” recounted Sadiq, as he lay bed-bound and weak from his injuries in his one-room family shack. “I kept telling them I had nothing to do with the riots, that I did not know anything but they kept beating me. The policemen told me to shout ‘Jai Sri Ram’ and I told them I would not so they put an iron rod into the flames of the car that was on fire and then held it against my hands to burn me.”

“Then some of the police officers tried to pick me up and put me in the flames of the car on fire,” Sadiq said, “but two of them said ‘no, let’s just take him to the police station’.”

Sadiq was kept in police detention for the next four days. Stripped to his underwear, he said he was tortured. For two days he was given no food or water and no medical treatment for his badly bleeding wounds. When he was finally released his condition was so bad his mother, Rehana Begum, fainted when she came to collect him.

“His father is dead so he was the only earning member of this house but he has been beaten so badly across the knees he can not walk and can not work now so what will happen to us?” she said, her head in her hands.

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Why India’s Muslims Are in Grave Danger

India has been jolted by the deadliest communal violence in New Delhi in decades. The fighting began on Sunday, Feb. 23—just before U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in the country for meetings with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—and quickly escalated into mass riots, with Hindu mobs targeting Muslim homes in the city’s northeast. At least 45 people were killed—mostly Muslims.

Ashutosh Varshney, a Brown University professor and author of the prize-winning Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, believes last week’s riots in Delhi bear some of the hallmarks of an organized pogrom. India has been there before: In 2002, in Gujarat, when Modi was the state’s chief minister, more than 1,000 people were killed in religious riots. Most were Muslims. While Modi was later cleared of wrongdoing by the country’s judiciary, critics say that he could have done much more to prevent the attacks. And in 1984, again in Delhi, an estimated 3,000 Sikhs were targeted and killed after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. In both cases, experts say, riots could not have been conducted without some complicity on the part of the police.

Varshney believes last week’s deadly clashes could be repeated in other parts of the country—and that Muslims are particularly vulnerable. Here is a transcript of Foreign Policy’s interview with Varshney, lightly edited for clarity.

Ravi Agrawal: There’s been a bit of debate about whether the violence in Delhi last week should be defined as a riot or as something more serious—a pogrom. Can you explain the difference?

Ashutosh Varshney: Pogroms are a special class of riots when it’s no longer simply a clash between two mobs or groups. Instead, the police are siding with one group either by looking away or by abetting and sometimes even directly participating in the violence. The key difference between riots and pogroms lies in the behavior of the state—through its police. The term was born in tsarist Russia when pogroms were launched against Jews.

RA: Given what we know now, how would you classify the violence in Delhi?

AV: On the first day and night—Sunday, Feb. 23—we saw two mobs going at each other. There were deaths on both sides. But on the second and third day, the partisanship of the police became clear. A mosque, a Muslim shrine, and Muslim homes and shops were attacked. The police did not respond to calls for help. Logs suggest a high volume of those calls came from predominantly Muslim parts of northeast Delhi. But the police failed to show up. Hindu mobs then attacked with abandon.

The second part is more direct participation. There are videos, in particular one which shows young Muslim men being hit by a Hindu mob. And the cops are asking the fallen and beaten Muslim men to sing the national anthem—as they’re being hit. That is quite egregious.

But the more significant evidence thus far is of the police simply looking away and not responding to Muslim pleas for help as homes, places of worship, and commercial enterprises were attacked with impunity.

RA: The fact that all of this happened in New Delhi, the capital city of India, is significant.

AV: Delhi has a unique structure for police operations. In every other part of India, the police report to the state government, and not to the central government, because law and order is defined as a state subject by India’s constitution. But Delhi’s police reports to the central government, not to the state government—technically, Delhi is not a full-fledged state. The fact that the central government is led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would therefore make Modi’s government responsible for law and order in Delhi. And the minister of home affairs, Amit Shah, would be the final authority to which Delhi’s police force would report. So the responsibility for the failure to maintain law and order also lies at his door.

RA: Some of the perpetrators of the attacks were heard shouting “Jai Shri Ram,” or “Victory to Lord Ram.” Can you explain the significance of that chant?

AV: “Jai Shri Ram,” theologically speaking, is a celebration of Lord Ram, the Hindu deity known for compassion and considered to be the embodiment of the highest morality and ethics. But in recent Hindu nationalist ideological campaigns, Jai Shri Ram has been weaponized to express muscularity, masculinity, and coercion—as opposed to kindness and compassion. So, the meaning of Jai Shri Ram has been transformed into a battle cry for the establishment of a Hindu nationalist polity, presided over by a Hindu nationalist state.

RA: Given that you describe last week’s events in Delhi as bearing the hallmarks of the beginning of a pogrom, how severe is the danger of other, similar outbreaks of violence across the country?

AV: The most vulnerable Muslim populations are in BJP-ruled states, because the role of the police is critical—and the police comes under the state government. If BJP governments in various states of India push the police against the Muslims, then only the bravest police officers would resist, because the authority structure is very clear. The danger to Muslim minorities in BJP-ruled states is grave. Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state with a population of 200 million, seems particularly vulnerable. Muslims comprise about 18 percent of the population there, and they are spread out all over the state. There was a big riot in Muzaffarnagar in 2013, for example, and the police were nowhere to be seen. UP is also ruled by a politician, Yogi Adityanath, whose anti-Muslim prejudice and fervor is well-known and has been openly displayed.

RA: What can civil society and the media do to prevent outbreaks of violence?

AV: Civil society can be quite important in creating bulwarks of resistance and peace, but that is not something it can do instantly. The creation of inter-religious networks between Hindus and Muslims takes a few years, if not more. The probability of integrated communities coming apart is much lower than the probability of segregated communities coming apart.

A more immediate issue always is how to minimize the extent or the intensity of violence. And that’s where the media plays a key role. By reporting courageously; by condemning what it finds unacceptable and sees as clear violations of norms, rules, and laws; and by creating a narrative of critique, the media can slow down or reduce the intensity of violence.

Sometimes the police intervene, too—even without political approval. Legally and constitutionally, the police can step in during moments of crisis. However, those police officers, administrators, and bureaucrats seem fewer in number today than was the case earlier. They are not entirely absent: I repeatedly came across in my research examples of police officers and administrators who would simply apply the law and not follow a political script. But a large number of police officers and bureaucrats do not have the courage to stand up to political authorities.

RA: Journalists in India are under threat, meanwhile. One photographer told the Washington Post a mob threatened to remove his pants to check whether he was circumcised—essentially to determine if he was Muslim. How much of this has to do with messaging from the government?

AV: The ideology of the government has created a ground-level situation where instructions do not have to come from the top. So-called agents devise their own strategies and think that by acting in a bigoted manner, by attacking Muslims, they could rise in the political hierarchy. So the incentive structure that gets created from the top begins to acquire a logic of its own and activates storm troopers and lower-level functionaries on the ground who try to interpret what the party bosses might appreciate or be pleased by.

RA: Prime Minister Modi’s second term began last May, after he won a landslide national election. While signs of the current muscular, chauvinistic brand of Hinduism were there in his first term as well—as we saw in several incidents of lynchings of Muslims, for example—there’s been a marked acceleration in the ruling BJP’s push for its social agenda. Why is that the case?

AV: Ahead of Modi’s first term in 2014, the political campaign had very few Hindu nationalist themes. I couldn’t count more than two speeches. You can say there were dog whistles and some displays of bigotry in the functioning of the midlevel politicians, but it wasn’t a dominant narrative.

In the campaign ahead of Modi’s second term, in 2019, the platform was more directly about the Hindu nationalist reconstruction of India. It can be claimed that given that the BJP’s vote share increased by 7 percentage points, India’s elections have authorized a more ideological and cultural push of the Hindu nationalist variety. But it’s also clear from the election data that the mandate was a complicated one. The vote in favor of Modi was not necessarily one of simply pushing a social and cultural agenda. National security was also an issue. Welfare programs had gained popularity: The BJP’s programs for sanitation and cooking gas were popular. To see the May 2019 election as a vote for an ideological restructuring of India would be to place an excessive interpretation on the wishes of the electorate. But that’s what happens in politics. The BJP seems sufficiently emboldened to use the legislative route to start restructuring the polity. And the Citizenship Amendment Act that passed on Dec. 11—leading to the current spate of protests—was the culmination of that.

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NEWS/INDIA Half of India police feel Muslims more likely to commit crimes

A new study says police in India display "significant bias against Muslims", with half of the police personnel interviewed saying they feel Muslims are "naturally prone towards committing crimes".

The report, which surveyed 12,000 police personnel in 21 Indian states, also found one in three police staff felt mob violence in cases of cow slaughter was "natural".

The findings, published on Tuesday, come amid concern from the United Nations and rights groups over an increase in harassment of and violence against India's Muslim minority after the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, assumed power in 2014.

Since then, dozens of people, mostly Muslims, have been killed by vigilante mobs on allegations of eating beef or slaughtering cows - an animal considered sacred in Hinduism. Modi has repeatedly said authorities should punish vigilantes who commit violence in the name of cow protection, but his critics allege the government has not done enough to prosecute those accused of killings.

Tuesday's study, titled The Status of Policing in India Report: Police Adequacy and Working Conditions, found 14 percent of police surveyed believed Muslims were "very much likely" to be prone to committing crimes, while 36 percent felt members of the faith were "some-what likely" to do so.

"Thirty-five percent personnel feel (to a large extent and somewhat combined) that it is natural for a mob to punish the culprit in case of cow slaughter," it added.

"Some of the findings were very surprising," said Manjesh Rana, one of the researchers on the year-long survey, because "we believe that this could be the perception of the people but not the perception of the police."

But he added: "We can't really establish that the prejudices they have, whether it's affecting their work or not but there are always these chances."

The study also found 60 percent of those surveyed believed migrants from other states were more likely to commit crimes. Separately, more than half felt complaints of gender-based violence were false.

The researchers described the survey as the first of its kind in India, covering police perceptions on a range of issues, including working conditions, resources and obstacles to investigating crimes.

Nearly a third of respondents said pressure from politicians was the main obstacle to investigating crimes, while an overwhelming majority of 72 percent said they encountered "political pressure" in probes involving influential people.

The study also found more than a third of police personnel surveyed favoured handing out "a small punishment" for minor offences than a legal trial, while one out of five felt "killing dangerous criminals is better than a legal trial".

It added: "Four out of five personnel believe that there is nothing wrong in the police beating up criminals to extract confessions."

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In Sri Lanka, Muslims say Sinhala neighbours turned against them

The stench of turpentine overpowered Jiffriya Ameer as she cradled her husband's head on her lap on the front porch of her home and watched the blood drain from the gaping wound on his head and neck. Her three children watched in horror as their father gasped for breath.

She screamed for help, but three police officers stood, looking on in disbelief, she said. The only vehicle which could take 49-year old Saleem Ameer to the hospital was engulfed in flames.

Minutes earlier, a Sinhalese mob had attacked Ameer with swords, fatally wounding him before pouring turpentine on his face.

In the towns hit by violence, both Muslims and Sinhalese said they still felt unsafe, despite the increased presence of the armed forces in the region.

Jiffriya's Sinhalese neighbour said he feared reprisal attacks, and pointed to the presence of naval officers as evidence of such a threat.

Meanwhile, many Muslims said they fear they could be attacked again.

In Thummadora, another affected town about 40km east of Colombo, Abdul Wahid Mohamed Risvi, a 44-year-old father of three, is terrified about the possibility of more violence.

"I haven't gone to work in a week because I cannot leave my children alone. I cannot sleep well either," he said.

Many Muslims also said they no longer trust the police or the military to protect them.

"Before the incident took place, we asked for protection from the local monks and the police," Aboo Haneefa Mohammed Ahsan, 26, told Al Jazeera in Thummadora. "They promised to provide security. But we were attacked anyway."

Gunasekara admitted that "some incidents were reported in some areas after curfew", but added that the "situation was brought under control" after the military was deployed.

The army investigated accusations of its complicity in the attacks after a video emerged on social media purportedly showing a soldier in Thummadora gesturing to a mob to attack a mosque. The army concluded that the soldier was merely adjusting an arm strap.

Acting army spokesman General Roshan Seneviratne told Al Jazeera that "no incidents took place wherever the army was deployed".

'We can't look at each other's faces'
Meanwhile, residents in the affected towns report their long-existing relationships with their neighbours have deteriorated.

"We maintained a good relationship with the Sinhala community before the incident. Now we can't even look at each other's faces," Ahsan said.

Victims have said people from their own neighbourhoods were also involved in some of the attacks.

Mohammed Thowfeek Abdul Kamil, 39, said the CCTV footage of a mob attacking his electronics store in Nikerapitiya revealed that most of the perpetrators were local men.

"I recognised them when I watched the video," he said.

However, Risvi said while some of the local Sinhala population in Thummadora joined in the attacks, there were others who tried to protect their Muslim neighbours, sometimes at great personal risk.

"When two elderly Muslim women walked into the town, a Sinhalese family came to the road and brought them into their home to protect them. Some Sinhalese also tried to dissuade the mobs from attacking," he said.

One Sinhalese women in Thummadora, who requested anonymity, warned three Muslim families of the impending attacks and hid them in her home. She said she was terrified for her own family's safety but saw it as her duty to protect her neighbours.

"As a Buddhist, I must do my best to protect other people, regardless of their religion," she said.

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You know India’s democracy is broken when millions wait for election results in fear

Rana Ayyub is an Indian journalist and author of “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up."

In 2015, the first full year of Narendra Modi’s administration, a Muslim man named Mohammed Akhlaq and his son Danish were attacked by a mob of Hindu men in Dadri after being accused of storing beef in their refrigerator. Akhlaq died on the spot; Danish, who was preparing for the Indian administrative services, survived the lynching after two brain surgeries.

In an interview published last year, an exasperated Danish asked our leaders: “You want to make India a Hindu country? Would you kill all the Muslims or turn them out of the country? Please tell us to what extent you would go to finish Muslims?”

He added: “I’m very uneasy. I have a feeling that if the BJP comes back then something big will happen. I cannot say what it is. I feel as if something will break in our country and we will not be able to fix it.”

Danish’s fear permeates life for all Muslims in India. In recent years, we have seen an explosion of ethnic and religious mob violence. This year’s election campaign is fanning the flames.

On April 11, the first day of voting, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party sent out a tweet: “We will ensure implementation of NRC [National Register of Citizens] in the entire country. We will remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha, Hindus and Sikhs.”

The tweet was a quote from the party president, Amit Shah, who said it at an election rally. The NRC has been one of the most divisive and dangerous policies the BJP has backed in recent years. And the use of the word “infiltrators” was a not-so-veiled reference to Muslims. Soon after, Shah took his invective against Muslims a step further, promising to throw the “termites” in the Bay of Bengal.

The outrage and hate against Muslims are not just spreading like an epidemic on WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media platforms; they seep into our daily lives.

My brother, who works for a multinational corporation, was recently forced to vacate his apartment in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Mumbai. The proprietor offered him a rate higher than the market price because his Muslim family was making other tenants uncomfortable. A boycott of his family from all social events and engagements followed. He eventually had to leave his house — in the city where he grew up — simply because of bigotry.

This was not the first time our family felt like outsiders. In 1993, when Mumbai was rocked by anti-Muslim riots led by mentors of Modi in the BJP, we had to leave our apartment overnight to relocate to a Muslim-dominated town.

But the hate and discrimination are now policy. In the last year, I have heard Muslim friends, relatives and acquaintances discussing plans to relocate to friendlier countries or sending their children away to foreign universities if Modi is reelected. Certainly these are options only available to a privileged minority within the the community.

But for most of the 190 million Muslims in India, roughly 14 percent of the population, India remains home. And the choice laid out before them by the political leaders is to accept living as second-class citizens in their own country. A victory for Modi on May 23 will be seen as a mandate to amplify this hate and the “othering” of Indian Muslims in a way that will affect our secular democracy beyond repair.

With each day of this election campaign, Modi’s BJP has moved from dog whistle to brazen anti-Muslim polarization. Last month the party fielded Pragya Thakur, a candidate endorsed by Modi who has been charged in a terrorist attack that killed 10 Muslims and has been investigated in other attacks targeting Muslims.

Unlike other populist movements across the world, the BJP and Modi are being transparent in their messaging and policies against Muslims.

In 2002, I visited the western province of Gujarat as a relief worker in the aftermath of one of the worst riots in the history of the country. Thousands of Muslims were killed. Modi was the chief minister of the province and was criticized for his role in handling the bloodbath. Many of us passed through relief camps, met women who were raped, children who witnessed mobs murder their family members with swords and spears while chanting Hindu-nationalist slogans. When we went home, we felt a surge of relief to be back in our cosmopolitan cities, away from all that division.

But that hate, that anxiety is now all over the country that Modi rules.

In the past five years, Muslims like me, who had placed our faith in this secular democracy, are unable to recognize India. Something fundamental is broken, in the words of Danish, the lynching survivor.

It is not just the excesses of the ruling party and its marginalization of Muslims. It’s that many citizens have found this new language of hate liberating and acceptable. If they allow themselves to be blinded permanently, Indian democracy will cease to exist. And that is reason enough for each one of us to heed Danish’s words. Because if the world’s most populous democracy goes under, ripples will be felt across the world.

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Interview: Killing in the Name of Cows

Vigilante groups in India are beating up and sometimes killing people they suspect of slaughtering cows. They have, among other violent acts, assaulted Muslim men and women in train stations, stripped and beaten Dalits, force-fed cow dung and urine to two men, and raped two women and killed two men for allegedly eating beef at home. Research consultant Jayshree Bajoria speaks to Philippa Stewart about the violence blighting the country.

Can you tell me what’s happening in India and why people are being attacked over cows?

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and groups affiliated with it have been whipping up Hindu nationalism for votes. Since many Hindus consider cows to be sacred, these groups decry the slaughter of cattle for beef or leather.  Most states in India already have laws that protect cows, but this political campaign is centered on claims that not enough is being done to protect cows.

Not only have some BJP leaders repeatedly called for cow protection and banning the consumption of beef, in some states we’ve seen BJP officials voicing support for these so-called cow protection groups.

This kind of political support has enabled these vigilante groups to attack cattle traders and people they suspect of slaughtering cows and sometimes bulls or buffaloes. They believe, sometimes rightly, that they will not be held accountable for these violent crimes.

These groups killed atleast 44 people between May 2015 to December 2018, 36 of them Muslims. Muslims and Dalits (formerly “untouchables”) are frequent targets of the violence because many of them run butcher shops, and Dalits have traditionally skinned the carcasses for commercial purposes such as leather. I met one distraught father who watched his young son being beaten to death. He said he was helpless, because he was outnumbered. If he had tried to save his son, he would have been killed too.

So, is it only minority religions and people who eat beef who are affected?

Absolutely not. These laws and the violence by these groups are harming the rural economy at a time when India has its highest unemployment rate in 45 years.

Before these tougher policies and the violence, even Hindu farmers would sell off old or unproductive cattle because they couldn’t afford to keep them. Now they just abandon them. This has led to a huge increase in the numbers of stray cattle across the country. It has become a serious issue: they pose a traffic hazard in towns and cities; in villages, they get into people’s farms and destroy crops.

Farmers have started locking stray cattle in empty schools, government buildings, whatever they can find, and many state governments have had to put millions of dollars into building more cow shelters.

Can you talk more about how political rhetoric has enabled this violence?

These vigilante groups doubtlessly feel that the authorities are on their side because there have been comments and actions, largely from elected BJP officials, aimed at showing Hindu nationalists that the government takes cow protection seriously. In some cases, BJP leaders have even publicly justified the attacks.

For example, in December 2018 in Uttar Pradesh, a police officer who tried to confront a Hindu mob was shot and killed. The response from the BJP chief minister immediately after this attack was to call it an “accident.” He also warned that “illegal slaughtering, and not just cow slaughter is banned in the entire state,” which seemed to some to be condoning the violence.

The police said they were going to focus on the people who killed the cows, which led to the mob attack and the murders. The exact quote was: “The cow killers are our top priority, the murder and the rioting are on the back burner for now.”

In most cases that we investigated, we found the police either stalled investigations, or in some cases were even complicit in the cover-up of murder. In quite a few instances police filed cases under cow protection laws against the victims or their families and associates. Sometimes witnesses decide not to testify after this.

A case that sticks in my mind is the story of Akbar Khan, a 28-year-old man. In July last year he and an associate, Aslam, were returning from Rajasthan after buying two cows when they were attacked. Aslam managed to flee but saw the men brutally beating Akbar.

Later it was revealed that police took three hours to take Akbar to the hospital, which was only 20 minutes away. He was alive when the police picked him up and was dead on arrival at the hospital. The man who tipped the police off was a member of a local ‘cow protection’ group. He told the media the police stopped to drink tea before taking Akbar to the hospital and were arranging for someone to look after the cows while he was lying injured in their car.

In Gujarat you can get life in prison for killing a cow, which is the same punishment as killing a man or woman.

There was widespread condemnation of the incident, and one policeman was suspended, and four others were transferred. Three people were arrested for the attack, but a BJP lawmaker demanded their release and called for Aslam’s arrest under cow protection laws.

Is it typical that the people committing the violence don’t get punished?
There have been only two cases, both in Jharkhand state, where people have been tried and convicted for serious crimes related to cow violence. In the first case a man named Alimuddin Ansari was killed and a fast-track court convicted 11 people and sentenced them to life. They appealed their case and the court released them on bail pending a final verdict. The first thing they did was go to the house of a BJP leader, a minister in the central government. He welcomed them, placed garlands around their necks, and told the media he had legally assisted them. He said they were relieved they would get a fresh trial.

The second case is that of the 12-year-old boy I mentioned earlier. The vigilantes killed him and a man and then hanged their bodies from a tree. His father and the other man’s brother were eyewitnesses. In December a court convicted eight men of the killings.

Lawyers say that one reason both these cases led to convictions was the strong eyewitness testimony. The witnesses stood their ground and testified.

Besides the threat of violence, what kinds of punishment do people in the beef and leather industry face?
 
In Gujarat you can get life in prison for killing a cow, which is the same punishment as killing a man or woman.

In several BJP-ruled states, the government expanded existing laws protecting cows, and in many cases increased the punishments.

Then in January, there was a deeply troubling development when the Uttar Pradesh government applied the National Security Act against three men arrested for cow slaughter in December. The newly formed Congress Party government in Madhya Pradesh did the same thing in February.

The National Security Act is designed to stop someone from committing a serious crime against national security in the future. You can be held without charge for up to a year. The justification for using this repressive law was that it would prevent people from killing more cows.

So, the police are stalling investigations into murders, or even covering them up. At the same time, they are filing cases against victims of cow vigilantes.

Who is trying to address this rising violence? 
 
There are many groups in India that are working to support victims of cow vigilantes, especially to provide legal aid. There are also some groups working on documenting these crimes better, to bring them to the public’s attention. Unfortunately, the government does not collect data on these specific crimes. So civil society groups and the media have taken on that responsibility.

What more needs to be done, especially by the government?
India’s Supreme Court has already issued directives about what needs to be done to address these mob killings. It said the state governments should assign a senior police officer in each district to prevent the violence and ensure there is prompt prosecution, and that victims and witnesses are safeguarded.

There’s a pending law on communal violence – that is, violence committed across ethnic or religious lines – that should be passed after ensuring that it is compliant with international human rights standards.

Most of all, the government needs to make it known that those involved in vigilante violence will be fully prosecuted and that government officials and political party leaders will no longer protect them.

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“When Your Whole Family is Destroyed Why Will You Not Fight for Justice”: Bilkees Rasool

 “ I am happy that the court has acknowledged the pain I had to go through. Finally, the court has accepted it. I have waited for it for so long,” said Bilkis Rasool, almost in tears as she addressed the media today.

It was a press conference everyone who has been following the travails of the victims of the horrific Gujarat violence 2002 had been waiting for. Bilkis, then a young girl was gang raped. 14 members of her family, including her three and a half year old daughter was killed. Other female members of her family were raped and murdered before her eyes, memories that continue to haunt her.

She filed her first FIR in Limkheda police station in March 2003. And since then has moved from court to court seeking justice.

“I had full faith in my Constitution and always believed that justice would be done,” she said. The court ordered compensation of Rs 50 lakhs to her. Bilkees said that now she will settle down in one place, and leave her nomadic life behind. She along with her husband Yaqub and family had been moving from house to house, locality to locality, in search of security and justice.

She said that she will use part of the compensation to help others fighting similar battles. Bilkis was pregnant when she was raped, and alter gave birth to her second daughter Hajra. She said she wanted her girl to be a lawyer. “One of my daughters was lost, we did not even get her body, I pray she is in heaven and rests in peace,” she said.

“I saw my Saleha being stoned in front of me I saw my three old girl dying. We could not even bury her,” the survivor of Gujarat 2002 said. Bilkis wants to help other children, and will create a Saleha fund from the compensation money to be able to do so.

Asked what kept her going, her response was simple: “when you have seen your entire family, your life destroyed, why will you not fight for justice.”

The long years of struggle have taken a toll. The relief has still to sink in. As her lawyer Shobha pointed out, the system was weighed against her. “One has to read the chargesheet to understand how the system tried to save the perpetrators. In the closure report Bilkis was not even examined for rape, only for injury,” she said. The lawyer said that the picture changed only after the CBI was brought in . Even then when everything else failed, the advocates filed for compensation. And this, Shobha said, is that very rare case when maximum compensation has for rape has been granted by the court.

Yakub, Bilkis’ husband, has been virtually living on daily wages for these 17 years. He works when he gets a job. He said that the Gujarat government failed in helping the family, and not even provided security when they were under threat. The family has moved in Gujarat, then to Delhi, Lucknow and Mumbai. Today Bilkis is living with her family of seven in Devgadh Baria’s Rahimabad relief colony. They were trying to flee town on that fateful day as mobs had started attacking the Muslims. She boarded a bus with 17 members of her family. The bus was attacked by a mob and 14 of her family were killed. Apart from her daughter, her mother too died. Bilkis was five months pregnant at the time.

She was left for dead. She woke up in blood and bodies around her. She still has nightmares. She has four daughters now but the wounds remain.

Timeline of the Initial Years

March 3 2002: Bilkis Rasool was gang raped. 14 members of her family , including her 31/2 year old daughter, murdered. Several female members of her family also raped and murdered. Bilkis was the only eyewitness and adult survivor of he horrific massacre.

March 2003: Bilkis files first FIR in Limkheda police station. Names rapists but this was not included in the FIR.

March 25, 2003: One year after incident Summary A report filed and accepted by Limkheda Judicial Magistrate effectively closing case. Inconsistencies cited as reason.

April 2003: Bilkis approaches National Human Rights Commission that does not directly take up her case but requests senior counsel Harish Salve to represent her in the Supreme Court.

April 2003: Bilkis herself becomes a petitioner in Supreme Court. Her main prayers are: quashing of Summar A order of Limkheda Magistrate, CBI enquiry and action against errging Gujarat police officers, compensation.

September 25, 2003: SC asks Gujarat government to stop state CID investigation. State CID had started harassing Bilkis and members of her extended family.

December 18, 2003: SC asks CBI to undertake investigations.

January 22, 2004: CBI arrests 12 accused.

February 11, 2004: CBI files interim report where several gross violations and complicity of Gujarat police highlighted.

March 2004: CBI arrests two police officers.

April 19, 2004: CBI files chargesheet against 20, including six police officers and two government doctors.

May 12, 2004: CBI files final report disclosing gross violations and complicity of the Gujarat state.

May, 2004: Witnesses given CISF protection by the Supreme Court as Bilkis and witnesses face threats.

July 2004: Bilkis files additional petition requesting transfer of cases outside Gujarat.

August 6, 2004: SC orders Bilkis case to be transferred to suitable court in Mumbai.

January 13, 2005: Charges framed against 19 of the 20 accused. Trial of one Dr Sangeeta Prasad separated as she is declared medically/mentally unfit for trial.

February 22, 2005:Bilkis examined by Special Public Prosecutor continues. She identifies in court the 12 accused who raped her, killed her daughter, and raped and killed members of her family.

Case went on in the Supreme Court, being challenged by the accused. She was finally awarded compensation by the court in 2019.

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The Samjhauta acquittals: Hindu terror goes unpunished in India

Earlier this month, the acquittal of the four main suspects in the 2007 Samjhauta Express blast case has once again brought the Indian government's commitment to fighting Hindu terror groups into question.

The attack on the train also known as the "friendship express", which links India to Pakistan, left 68 persons dead. The majority of the victims were Pakistani citizens. The blast caused major embarrassment for India's intelligence and security services - it took place only 70km away from the capital New Delhi and in a train that was supposedly guarded by the Indian security services - and threatened to wreck ongoing efforts to build a sustainable peace between India and Pakistan.

While the then-opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well as some Indian media organisations, tried to blame Pakistan-based terror groups for the attack, the Congress government classified the incident as an "an attempt to derail the improving relationship between India and Pakistan" and vowed that culprits - whoever they may be - would be caught.

An investigation by India's National Investigation Agency (NIA) eventually concluded that the attack was carried out by four men - Swami Aseemanand, Kamal Chauhan, Rajinder Chaudhary and Lokesh Sharma - linked to the Hindu far-right group Abhinav Bharat. All four suspects were charged by the NIA, making many believe justice would soon be delivered for the victims.

However, on March 20 this year, a special court in the northern state of Haryana acquitted all four suspects, citing lack of evidence. Following the shock decision, the NIA did not declare an intention to appeal to a higher court or initiate a new probe to find and punish the culprits behind the deadly attack. The Indian home minister, Rajnath Singh, also made it clear the government will not pursue an appeal; instead, he said that it is his "personal stand" that "Pakistan is always responsible for such terrorist attacks."

In other words, for all intents and purposes, the case is now closed.

The unsatisfactory ending to the Samjhauta Express investigation is only the latest in a line of judicial and political decisions which reflect a failure to pursue justice for Muslim victims of attacks.

In April last year, for example, a court acquitted all 11 men charged by the NIA in the 2007 Mecca Masjid blast case where six people, all Muslims, were killed in the southern city of Hyderabad. The NIA had in its probe found that members of the Abhinav Bharat, including Samjhauta Express blast suspect Swami Aseemanand, were responsible for the blast. But eventually, the court deemed the strong body of evidence previously presented by the investigating agency insufficient to declare the accused guilty. The NIA did not attempt to appeal the decision or continue the investigation.

In December 2010 - January 2011, Aseemanand made a series of confessions to the courts admitting his role in the blasts targetting Muslims. A few months later, he retracted these confessions, claiming that they had been extracted under torture.

In 2014, however, speaking to a journalist for the news magazine Caravan, he denied being tortured and once again admitted to various acts of violence targetting Muslims. In the same interview, he also claimed that the plot to bomb Muslim targets across the country was blessed by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leaders Mohan Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar.

Despite contradictory testimonies by leading suspects like Aseemanand, as well as a large body of evidence presented to the courts by the NIA demonstrating the Hindu far-right's role in several terror attacks targeting Muslims, the people responsible have been let off the hook.

This travesty of justice is the result of not only years-long efforts by far-right groups to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, but also the current Indian government's inclination to shield groups sympathetic to its Hindu-nationalist agenda from scrutiny at all costs.

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Why Lynchings Have Become A Substitute For Communal Riots

Indeed, lynching has replaced the age-old communal riot as a means of polarization. Lynching comes without the burden of guilt that used to accompany riots. It is more effective, lethal and sinister. It strikes at the very identity of the community. It is far more demoralizing than the traditional communal violence, but serves the same purpose as riots did in the years gone by: to engender a climate of distrust and fear. 

On one side are Hindus who begin to look at any Muslim, particularly those with conspicuous manifestation of being one, with distrust. In their mind, all Muslims are beefeaters. And, maybe, even cow slaughterers. Nothing wrong with that if you are in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and vast stretches of the Northeast, but often a fatal flaw in north and west India. To those Hindus denied the benefit of education and economic cushion, a Muslim is one who deliberately provokes Hindus by eating beef. They do not know the reality or the history of beef eating in their own religion. For such a misled vigilante, the Muslim is the ‘other’ who must be shown his place. For him, a Muslim is what the latest video, real or fake, on WhatsApp shows him to be. Also, a Muslim is to be tackled, again, in the way those hooligans do in the lynching videos. That brings us to Muslims. With each lynching incident, the community slips deeper into fear, and into its own shell. And a community which is often told to join the mainstream slips further away.

Muslim traders in Ghansali town of Uttarakhand’s Tehri Garhwal district said on Wednesday they are wary of opening their shops, two days after a man from their community was beaten up by a mob when he was found with a minor Hindu girl, sparking calls for their ouster.

Around the same time came another media report wherein young men and women in Delhi revealed that they call up their parents and grandparents not to offer namaz (prayer) on a train for the fear of being identified. This in a country where it was not unusual for people to make space for Muslim travellers to offer namaz as a train halted at the railway station, or even on the train itself. Writing in The Wire, Apoorvanand stated,

A friend narrated his experience of offering namaz at the railway platform while waiting for his train. On earlier occasions, it had always been normal for him and others to pray in public. But this time, he was extra alert. A shout, a loud voice made him strain his ears. Was it for him? We who used to make space for namazis in train, in our homes, offices, and even offer a prayer mat to them have gone silent. Goondas have become our voice. This silence will drown India if we allow it to spread.

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