India’s ‘organised massacre’
‘Nothing will happen to us’ — rhetoric Delhi police used to attack Muslims, writes Jeffrey Gettleman
Kaushar Ali, a house painter, was trying to get home when he ran into a riot. Hindu and Muslim mobs were hurling rocks at each other, blocking the street he needed to cross to get to his children. Ali, who is Muslim, said he turned to some police officers for help. That was his mistake.
The officers threw him onto the ground, he said, and cracked him on the head. They started beating him and several other Muslims. As the men lay bleeding, begging for mercy — one of them died two days later from internal injuries — the officers laughed, jabbed them with their sticks and made them sing the national anthem. That abuse, on Feb 24, was captured on video.
“The police were toying with us,” Ali said, as he recalled them saying, “even if we kill you, nothing will happen to us”. So far, they have been right. India has suffered its worst sectarian bloodshed in years, in what many here see as the inevitable result of Hindu extremism that has flourished under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His party has embraced a militant brand of Hindu nationalism, and its leaders have openly vilified Indian Muslims. In recent months, Mr Modi has presided over a raft of policies widely seen as anti-Muslim, such as erasing the statehood of what had been India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir.
Now, more evidence is emerging that the Delhi police, who are under the direct command of Mr Modi’s government and have very few Muslim officers, concertedly moved against Muslims and at times actively helped the Hindu mobs that rampaged in New Delhi in late February, burning down Muslim homes and targeting Muslim families.
Several videos showed police officers beating and throwing rocks at Muslim protesters and waving on Hindu mobs to join them.
A police commander said that as the violence erupted — at that point mostly by Hindu mobs — officers in the affected areas were ordered to deposit their guns at the stations. Several officers during the violence were later overheard by New York Times journalists yelling to one another that they had only sticks and they needed guns to confront the growing mobs.
More than two thirds of the 53 people killed who have been identified were Muslim. Human rights activists are calling it an organised massacre.
Although India’s population is 14% Muslim and New Delhi’s is 13%, the total Muslim representation on the Delhi police force is less than 2%.
India’s policing culture has long been brutal, biased, anti-minority and almost colonial in character, a holdover from the days of British rule when the police had no illusions of serving the public but were used to suppress a restive population. All of this is emboldening Hindu extremists on the street.
Some Muslims are leaving their neighbourhoods, having lost all faith in the police. More than 1,000 have piled into a camp for internally displaced people that is rising on Delhi’s outskirts.
Muslim leaders see the violence as a state-sanctioned campaign to teach them a lesson. After years of staying quiet as Hindu lynch mobs killed Muslims with impunity and Mr Modi’s government chipped away at their political power, India’s Muslim population awoke in December and poured into the streets, along with many other Indians, to protest the new immigration law, which favours migrants belonging to every major religion in South Asia — except for Muslims.
Mr Modi’s government, Muslim leaders say, is now trying to drive the whole community back into silence. “There’s a method to this madness,” said Umar Khalid, a Muslim activist. “The government wants to bring the entire Muslim community to their knees.”
“You can read it in their books,” he said, referring to foundational texts by Hindu nationalists. “They want India’s Muslims to live in perpetual fear.”