“Five years have passed since my brother was burned alive. First, they pumped him with bullets. They then beat him with sticks. And finally, they set him on fire.”
Saleem Kassar was speaking in a solidarity gathering organised in Delhi by the Karwan e Mohabbat on February 26, the fifth anniversary of the communal carnage that had rocked the working-class enclave of North East Delhi from February 23, 2020.
“I was watching all of this unfold from a distance, on the third storey of a neighbouring building,” he continued. “I was helpless. I could do nothing to save the life of my brother.”
“My home, my factory, all of these were then looted. The crowds threw petrol on these buildings and set them all on fire. They burnt our vehicles as well. Everything we owned was reduced to ashes. We kept calling the police to come to our rescue but no one came.
“We were saved only because of our Hindu neighbour Abhishek. I salute him. We owe our lives to him. He put a tilak on my forehead to make me look like a Hindu. He took all nine members of our family into his home.
“Some days later, after the violence came down, I went with a group of neighbours to the police station. I told them that I saw the crowd burn my brother alive. I wanted to know if he was alive or dead, and if he was dead, I wanted his body. The police assured me that they would investigate. They called me from the spot I had seen my brother set on fire. They said they could not find his body. They only found a foot.
“‘Can you recognise his limb?’ they asked me. I told them that we have been together since childhood, I am sure I would recognise his foot. That night, I went to the mortuary of GTB Hospital where they showed me the limb wrapped in plastic. ‘This is my brother’, I told them. I was sure. I would go every other day to the hospital to get back this last remnant of my brother, but to no avail. Finally, a DNA test established that the limb was indeed of my brother. It took me a full year for me to get his limb.
“I have no money now after the riots. I would walk to the hospital. I would walk to the courts. In the court, I identified the men who had shot bullets on my brother, by placing my hands on their shoulders. But the judge would scold me when I tried to tell him what happened. He said sternly, ‘only speak when I ask you a question’. The accused men had many lawyers. My lawyer completely let me down. The men I identified were arrested but quickly got bail. They bragged to me to my face – ‘we paid money and got bail. We will pay more money and get acquitted.’”
There were few eyes that were not moist in the packed hall as Saleem Kassar spoke these words of his torment and despair to us.
Others spoke in the Karwan e Mohabbat solidarity meeting as well. One of these was Mumtaz Begum, who began sobbing, unable to find words. Her husband Wakil had just peered out of the window of their tiny tenement when they heard fearsome roars of mobs storming the streets. At that moment, someone threw some liquid at his face. It turned out to be acid. Doctors treated him for two years, but they could not restore his eyesight. The acid had left him completely blind. Before the attack, he ran a small grocery shop. Now the family was completely destitute.
Rihana Begum spoke of the bitter social divides that continue to tear apart their neighbourhood. “The violence that took place five years ago is still not over,” she declared. “The violence continues. In the neighbourhood where I live, people still treat us as if we have murdered someone, looted someone. When after the riots we returned home, people would look at us as if we had looted their homes. And we still have to face this hostility. It gets worse when there are events like the inauguration of the temple in Ayodhya. They then raised slogans in the streets that made us very frightened. Whenever there is a small argument about something, they say that this is the house of a Muslim, they should not live here. Even today we are facing this. But we are not going anywhere. We are still here.”
But many like Kassar before him spoke also of Hindu neighbours saving their lives. Shehzad Asghar Zaidi owned an electricals shop. He has five daughters, no sons, but earned enough from the shop. The day of the riots, a Hindu neighbour told him that a crowd had set fire to his shop. He watched helplessly from a distance. A day later, he went to the shop to search in the rubble for some important documents. There a man tried to assault him with a knife. But another Hindu man ran and stood between them, saying he would not allow the man to harm him. “The man who tried to kill me was a Hindu. The one who saved me also was a Hindu. What can I say?”
Then began what Zaidi described as his “second war”, for justice and compensation. No one was punished for looting and burning his shop. Although his loss was of Rs 5-6 lakh, the only compensation the state gave him after knocking endlessly on several doors was Rs 5,000.
Rafiq, who owned a two-storey second-hand clothes shop at Maujpur Chowk also is empty-handed after five years. He said that looting, arson and stone pelting began soon after Bharatiya Janata Party politician Kapil Mishra made his inflammatory speech on February 23. He barely escaped with his life. Running desperately through narrow lanes, he somehow reached home. Four days later, his neighbours told him that his shop was burned down by blasting gas cylinders. Again, he was given no compensation.
Mohammad Shahzad owned a “dharam kanta”, a large industrial grade weighbridge used to weigh heavy load vehicles like trucks. He employed 15 to 20 workers, the majority of whom were Hindus. A Hindu worker called him in panic saying that an angry crowd raising slogans had gathered and were setting the weighbridge on fire. Shahzad called the police. The man on the other side assured him that they would quickly send their forces. He then asked his name. It was clear that he was Muslim. No police forces arrived on time to disperse the crowds or quell the fires. His workers told him later that when the police did arrive, much was already devastated but they only encouraged the mob to complete their destruction. The crowd also set fire to his vehicles parked around the weighbridge, and beat a worker almost to death.
Through all of this, Shahzad was hiding at home, cowering with his family. A large mob gathered there as well, and pelted so many stones and bricks that soon you could not see the floor, only a bed or stones and bricks. He pursued the police for weeks later, but they did nothing to investigate and arrest the real culprits. Instead, they would threaten him.
His father was a poor worker, and died young, Shahzad said, speaking of all his struggles to build up his business. Now it was all reduced to ruins. His losses ran into crores of rupees. The compensation that he received is just Rs 12,500.
Faizan was just 14 when a stray bullet changed his life during the communal carnage. His mother had died when he was a child. His father abandoned him and his brother. It was his grandmother who raised them. On the second day of the violence his grandmother sent him out to buy some food from the grocery store on his lane. There a raging crowd rushed into the neighbourhood. Faizan ran in terror, but a bullet felled him. Neighbours ran to inform his grandmother who fainted when she heard what had happened to him. The neighbours carried him to a clinic. Blood was gushing out of a deep wound on his back. The doctor at the clinic bandaged the wound but said he had to be taken to a hospital urgently if his life was to be saved. But this seemed impossible; there were crowds everywhere, pelting stones, setting buildings on fire. No vehicle, no ambulance was allowed to move.
It was a compassionate journalist, Nikita Jain, who saved his life. With the help of his neighbours, she laid him on a wooden cart and covered him with a sheet. They pushed him on the cart through the mob until they reached a police jeep. There the journalist begged the policemen to transport him to a hospital. The police, initially reluctant, finally relented, but even as they drove him to a hospital, Faizan recalls that they taunted him. “Go out and agitate again. This is what will happen to you. You have got what you deserve,” they said. Jain, the journalist and Faizan’s grandmother did not leave his side. In the hospital, they asked him to rest on a wooden bench. The doctors were rough and abrasive, but his two caregivers persisted with them. Ultimately, they operated on him two days later, took out the bullet, but his nerves were damaged and he found it difficult to walk. My colleagues in the Karwan e Mohabbat worked with him these five years and he is today able to walk even if with a prosthetic limp.
His grandmother died in 2021. His elder brother takes care of him, and has encouraged him to continue with his studies. He met the officials for compensation, but they kept demanding documents that they do not have. They wanted the Aadhaar card of his father, and dismissed his plea that their father had abandoned them from the time they were children. So, no compensation has come his way.
The community in which he lives is badly divided now. During Ramzan, he went to a shop wearing a skullcap, but the shopkeeper blocked his entry, telling him that he did not wish to sell his wares to any Muslim. “But not all Hindus are like this,” Faizan told us. “There are many Hindus who place their hands on my shoulder and encourage me to rebuild my life.”
The consistent record of the Indian state in securing justice and reparation for survivors of mass communal violence ever since the first major post-Independence riot in Jabalpur in 1961 is badly tainted, with few exceptions. But even by these disgraceful standards, the communal carnage in North East Delhi stands apart.
To begin with, the violence occurred in the national capital, the seat of both the national and Delhi governments. Delhi is the national headquarters of all the armed forces and most paramilitary formations. If there was a will, what by any standards was a small skirmish in a working-class enclave of the city could have been controlled in literally a matter of hours. The fact that it continued unhindered for six days is a reflection not simply of dishonourable state failures. It is evidence of criminal state complicity. It cannot be disputed that the violence continued so long only because the state wished for it to continue.
Despite hate speech by prominent leaders of the BJP, and despite our interventions in the Delhi High Court and strong admonitions by acting Chief Justice Muralidhar, the police refused to register crimes against any of them. One of those who called for the shooting of “traitors to the nation”, dog-whistling Indian Muslims, was elevated to a union cabinet minister. Five years later, a second has been appointed, nothing less than the law and justice minister of the Delhi government.
Wantonly failing to prevent or control the violence, the next urgent duty of the state was to rescue those whose lives, homes and properties were threatened by the riotous mobs. But instead, more than 13,000 calls to the police went unheeded. We made a call for volunteers to set up a citizens’ control room. Within hours more than 40 young people gathered in my office, and did not leave for five days. I requested Shashikant Senthil, who had recently resigned from the Indian administrative services and is now a Lok Sabha MP, to head the citizen control room.
Desperate calls poured in, especially of boys and men with bullet injuries who could be saved only if they were rushed to hospitals, but the mobs and the police would not allow even ambulances to move. Even wartime ethics mandate the free movement of injured people to hospitals. It took our midnight intervention, once again with Justice Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court, to direct the police to ensure the safe movement of ambulances. It is shameful that it required the High Court to move the police to fulfil its most elementary duty to ensure that lives were saved.
The state government initially took no steps to establish relief camps, following in the ignoble footsteps of the Gujarat government in 2002. When criticised widely for this, the Delhi government then designated nine homeless shelters as relief camps. This was nothing more than a cruel insult to the thousands who had been rendered homeless by the violence. Homeless shelters are bare tin sheds in which homeless people are packed, especially in winter months, in unsanitary and undignified conditions. How could these double up as places of safety and healing for the thousands displaced by the communal violence? In the Indian Administrative Service, which I have been a part of, officers are trained to establish relief camps after natural and human-made disasters. Delhi, the national capital, had so many resources that could have been easily deployed for exemplary relief camps, like stadiums and college buildings. Instead, the government chose to offer no effective relief to those battered in the communal storms.
The story of compensation – described in the report of the Karwan e Mohabbat titled The Absent State: Denial of Reparation & Recompense to the Survivors of the 2020 Delhi Pogrom – is even more dismal. The Union government did not announce a compensation scheme and in five years has not extended a single rupee to the survivors of the violence. The state government started off better, but this lasted only the first weeks. It at least announced a compensation scheme, although at levels much lower than for the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. Officials of the state government effectively distributed death compensation and ex gratia relief.
But soon, in March itself, the Delhi government approached the Delhi High Court to establish a separate agency to assess and distribute compensation. This was inexplicable and inexcusable, because rescue, relief, compensation and rehabilitation of those hit by communal and caste violence is a fundamental duty of the state, deriving indeed from the constitutional fundamental right to life of those struck by violence. There was no rationale for seeking the delegation of this duty to an external body.
The agency designated by the High Court for this task was a commission that in fact had been established for a very different, even contrary purpose. This was to assess losses to public properties that was to be recovered from the rioters. Entrusted with this onerous new responsibility of extending fair compensation to the survivors of the communal violence, the commission first took seven months even to begin its work. It then haphazardly appointed private evaluators to assess the damage and loss suffered by survivors. The process and norms to be deployed by these private evaluators was not made public. Neither the evaluators nor the commission heard those who had suffered the losses. They typically gave no reasons for their assessments. And there was no provision for even a single appeal against the assessments. All of this flies against all principles of natural justice.
The assault on the fundamental rights of the victims of the violence did not end here. The commission, in the small number of petitions that it has resolved, has decided levels of compensation that are a tiny fraction of the actual damage. But the commission said it had no funds to actually disburse even the small amounts of compensation it has fixed. A scrutiny of the budgets of the state government, even for 2020 and for all the years since, reveals that there was not even a budget line and no budget set aside for payment of compensation.
In a total budget of the Delhi government of around Rs 75,000 crore, even generous provisions of compensation would not exceed 1%-2% of this total. Obviously then, the denial of compensation to the victim survivors of the 2020 Delhi communal violence is not a small oversight necessitated by a shortage of funds. Like the refusal to prevent the violence, to rescue those whose lives and properties were threatened by marauding mobs, and to extend relief to those who were rendered homeless, the denial of compensation to the survivors even five years after the violence is a wanton denial unconscionable for a democratic government pledged to uphold its duties under the constitution.
The comprehensive subversion of justice is even more reprehensible. Numerous independent media and citizen reports and even court judgments indicate how the effort of the Delhi police seems to have been to protect and punish the perpetrators of the violence and to criminalise innocent victims. After the Delhi communal violence of 2020, the police registered 758 FIRs, including one claiming that protestors against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 and those active in relief work were actually conspirators who planned the communal carnage.
In a statement to the High Court last April, the police reported that in 289 cases, investigations are still underway. Trials continue in 296 cases, and in 173 matters the court has passed orders and the cases have been dismissed.
A significant investigation by BBC Hindi – as part of which they filed a series of right to information applications and examined the police websites – revealed shockingly that in more than 80% of the decided cases, the accused have been acquitted of their crimes. The BBC reporters examined 126 of these cases and found some clear patterns. Witnesses commonly turned “hostile”, meaning that they refused to stand with the police version in the court. In other cases, the police themselves were witnesses but the courts did not find them reliable. In many cases, the courts raised serious questions about the integrity of the investigation of the police, suggesting that they framed innocent persons and absolved the guilty of their crimes. The police officers who deliberately subverted justice also, were rarely punished. Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Yadav of the Karkardooma District Court went so far as to pronounce that “when history looks at the Delhi riots, one thing that will pierce (the public conscience) is that the Delhi police did not investigate the crimes of the riots correctly. This failure will certainly trouble the defenders of democracy”.
Former judge of the Supreme Court Madan Lokur told BBC Hindi, “If the prosecution throws (innocent) people into jail just because they have the power to do this, they should not be allowed to get away with this. If the incarceration is found to be unjust or unnecessary – people stay in prison for many years before they get bail – the people who falsely framed them should be punished”. This observation applies even more to people who are being charged under anti-terror laws for planning the riots, but even five years later, the trial has not begun and they continue to languish in prison.
I am haunted by the words of Mohammad Shahzad, whose weighbridge worth crores was burnt down but he was given a compensation of Rs 12,500. “There are times when I wonder”, Shahzad said, “why I am born here? There is nothing here that you can call justice. What is my fault that I have had to suffer so much?”
Or of Saleem Kassar, who saw a mob shooting and then burning to death his brother. His factory and home burnt, he struggles to feed and educate his children. “Life is very hard”, he said, “but I do not want money. I want justice for my brother, recompense for the cruelty with which he was killed”.
He went on to declare softly, “If I do not get justice, I will take my own life”.
But is anyone listening?
Does anyone care?
I am grateful for the research support of Swati Draik and Syed Rubeel Haider Zaidi.
Harsh Mander, justice and peace worker and writer, leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to counter hate violence with love and solidarity. He teaches at FAU University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Heidelberg University, Germany; Vrije University, Amsterdam; and IIM, Ahmedabad.
