3 days of violence leave a trail of death, destruction, despair
CLASHES, BLOODSHED Many schools, shops, houses, showrooms, vehicles and mosques ransacked or burnt
NEWDELHI: Bilkis Khatoon frantically moved in and out of her burnt house in north-east Delhi’s Ashok Nagar neighbourhood on Wednesday afternoon, as she kept looking for whatever remained of her belongings.
All the furniture, mattresses, clothes, curtains and electronic appliances had been damaged in a fire – the result of an act of arson by a mob the previous night ; her little bag containing gold jewellery and cash savings, and a cooking gas cylinder had been looted by the rioters, she said.
Her neighbour Parveen elaborated on the sequence of events – how mobs attacked shops and business premises in the Muslim neighbourhood. The soot on the walls bore testimony of it. For Parveen, the search was focussed on one thing – the examination hall admission ticket of her daughter, Arshi, who is to appear in the class 12 board exams.
Around 3 km away in Brijpuri locality, Suresh Kaushik was trying to help a group of fire fighters trying to cool the embers of a burnt four-storey building. That, Kaushik said, was his residence, which he shared with his two siblings. While the siblings had moved out of the neighbourhood on Sunday after hearing about the first round of violence, Kaushik decided to stay back.
“I saw my house being set ablaze by a mob. I still have not been able to go inside to assess the damage. The heat is unbearable,” said Kaushik, standing in kneedeep water that had accumulated outside his house after the fire fighting operation.
Next to it, a private school owned by a Hindu was vandalised and parts of it torched by the same mob, other local residents said.
Over the past three days, large parts of north-east Delhi witnessed widespread violence that started with clashes between supporters of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and groups protesting against it in the Jafrabad-Maujpur road stretch. It later turned into a full-blown communal riot that spread to several districts – the interconnected maze of narrow lanes and on the arterial road connecting the Yamuna embankment with Loni, located on the Delhi-Ghaziabad border. The violence so far has claimed at least 27 and injured more than 330 people.
On Wednesday, as the police relaxed prohibitory orders barring the public assembly of four or more persons and opened several roads that had been barricaded for the last three days, the scale of the violence became clearer. The trail of damage included mosques, schools, shops, showrooms, vehicles, commercial buildings and residences. These properties had borne the brunt of arson, vandalism and ransacking by armed mobs that rampaged across districts. The victims were both Hindus and Muslims.
By Wednesday afternoon, even as the situation was visibly under control in areas such as Jafrabad, Maujpur, Kabir Nagar, Kardampuri, Durgapuri Chowk, Jyoti Nagar, Gokalpuri, Brijpuri, Ashok Nagar, Karawal Nagar and Yamuna Vihar, sporadic instances of stone throwing and vandalism were reported from pockets of Mustafabad, Bhajanpura and Shiv Vihar. Delhi police claimed there had been no incident of violence on Wednesday.
In the Shiv Vihar-Johripur area, locals said instances of stone-throwing took place on Wednesday as well. Abdul Majid, a resident of Shiv Vihar, said he noticed men setting fire to a vehicle on Wednesday afternoon. “I was on my terrace; I could see men on the other side burning a vehicle and pelting stones. We asked police forces to escort us to our relative’s house safely and even when they helped us leave our house, the men were walking threateningly towards us and asking the personnel to just move aside for a bit,” he said.
At least two schools in the area were vandalised and burnt along with several cars in a parking lot. Manoj Chandra, a security guard at the Rajdhani Public School, said he was in his living quarters inside the school when he heard the mob approach.
“The mob tried to attack us well. I jumped from the terrace and escaped with my wife and two children. When I came back, I saw they had ransacked my quarters and all my documents were missing,” he said.
“Once it became a full-blown communal matter, it did not matter which group attacked and who were the victims,” said Ashwin Nagar, a resident of Dayalpur, pointing towards a mosque and two Hindu houses on the same alley, torched by the same mob on Tuesday night.
On a 1 km stretch of Loni Road lined by engineering and medical entrance coaching centres and automobile repair centres, all shops had their glass panes shattered, parts of their premises torched and vehicles destroyed. While the neighbourhood facing one carriageway of that road was a Hindu-dominated pockets of Yamuna Vihar, the other was a Muslim-dominated pockets of Chand Bagh.
Although shops and businesses were open after three days, residents remained on the edge throughout the day as information came in of damage inflicted by rioters in neighbourhoods through word of mouth and news outlets. In several north-east Delhi localities on Wednesday, the police, along with officials of the Rapid Action Force, Central Reserve Police Force and Border Security Force, organised flag marches.
In some parts, they also encouraged local committees to organise short peace march to ease tension among the residents.
The police on Wednesday released a statement explaining that 18 First Information Reports (FIRs) had been registered and 106 people arrested in connection with the riots in the north-east district. “We are in the process of identifying the miscreants through investigations of CCTV footage and other strong evidence we have,” said MS Randhawa, Delhi police spokesperson.