Riots: Some questions remain

Home minister Amit Shah’s combative defence in Parliament on Wednesday of his government’s record over the recent riots in northeast Delhi, where he blamed the violence that raged for over three days on a “well-planned conspiracy”, was curiously fuzzy on certain aspects — such as why it took so long to end the violence. While the home minister stoutly defended the Delhi police, which falls under his direct charge, for containing the violence in “36 hours”, and said it deserved praise for not allowing it to spread over a wider area, he failed to explain why it needed that long in a metropolitan area, where reinforcements could have been rushed within an hour of the outbreak. He also didn’t explain why, as the violence was starting, the police personnel deployed in the vicinity, stood as bystanders. Indeed, as many Opposition parties as well as Delhi’s AAP government had demanded at the time, the Centre could have immediately called in the Army or at least the paramilitary forces and swiftly ended the violence. Mr Shah’s reply in the Lok Sabha did not cover this aspect either.

Mr Shah’s attack on the Congress, and specifically on the speech of its president Sonia Gandhi on December 14, two and a half months before the Delhi riots, where she is said to have referred to “aar paar ki ladai”, as a part of the so-called “conspiracy”, while downplaying the role of hate speeches like “goli maaro” by BJP leader Anurag Thakur and others just before the Delhi elections (two weeks before the riots), as well as the threatening language by the BJP’s Kapil Mishra a day before the outbreak, seems just partisan politics. The minister’s statement that a “scientific investigation” would be done with facial-recognition software to identify, and crack down on, those behind the violence seems justifiable —except that, given this government’s record, public confidence is low that it would deal with all communities fairly. That is why a full-fledged judicial inquiry into the causes of the Delhi outbreak might be the best way out.