Violence haunts India’s capital after riots
NEW DELHI — India’s hard-line Hindu nationalists watched anti-government protests centered in Muslim communities for months in anger that finally boiled over in the worst communal rioting in New Delhi in decades, leaving 32 people dead and the Indian capital shell-shocked.
Tensions had been building over a new citizenship law that critics see as a threat to India’s secular society and a way to further marginalize the country’s 200 million Muslims.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi feted President Donald Trump on his first state visit to India this week, a moment that was supposed to help cement the country’s place on the world stage but instead became an embarrassment.
On Sunday, as Mr. Modi prepared for Mr. Trump’s arrival, a group of predominantly Muslim protesters demonstrated in a northeastern corner of the capital against the citizenship law, which fast-tracks naturalization for some religious minorities from neighboring countries but not Muslims.
Kapil Mishra, a local leader of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party who lost his Delhi state assembly seat in recent elections, held his own rally, urging police to clear out the protesters.
“They want Delhi to burn,” Mr. Mishra said next to a police official.
By Thursday, the death toll from the violence that followed — between Hindus and Muslims who had lived side by side for centuries but attacked each other with guns and swords, metal rods and axes — had risen to 32 and threatened to climb still higher.
The streets where the rioting occurred, in Muslim and Hindu areas alike, resembled a war zone. Helmeted, camouflaged and baton-wielding police marched down pavements littered with broken glass and charred vehicles as residents peered fearfully from behind neighborhood gates they had locked from inside.
O.P. Mishra, joint commissioner of police, leading the march, said he was responsible for instilling in the residents “a sense of confidence that peace has returned.”
But a ban on groups of five or more people remained in place, and schools were closed.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said it was deeply troubled by the violence and cited accounts that police had not intervened in attacks against Muslims.
“The government is failing in its duty to protect its citizens,” commissioner Anurima Bhargava wrote.