NEW DELHI (AP) – The shooter shouted “Victory of Lord Ram”, the Hindu god, before firing the trigger that sent a bullet into Muhammad Nasir Khan’s left eye.
Khan placed his trembling hand on the bloody hole of his eye and his fingers slipped deep into his wound. At that moment, Khan was sure he would die.
Khan survived the violence that killed 53 others, mostly Muslim colleagues, when he raided a neighborhood in the Indian capital 12 months ago.
But a year after India’s worst communal riots in decades, the 35-year-old is still shaken and his attacker is still unpunished. Khan says he could not get justice due to the lack of interest of the police in his case.
“My only crime is that my name identifies my religion,” Khan said at his home in the North Ghonda district of New Delhi.
Many of the Muslim victims of last year’s bloody violence say they have repeatedly been hit by police refusing to investigate complaints against Hindu insurgents. Some hope that the courts will continue to come to their aid. But others believe that the justice system during the Hindu-nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become one against them.
In addition, the feeling of injustice is that the reports of Muslim victims, as well as the reports of rights groups, indicated that the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Modi and the New Delhi police force tacitly supported Hindu mobs during the feverish violence.
New Delhi police did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but insisted last year that their investigation was correct and that nearly 1,750 people had been booked in connection with the riots – half of them Hindus. Junior Interior Minister G. Kishan Reddy also told Parliament that the police acted quickly and impartially.
But a letter was sent to investigators five months after the riots, which an elderly police officer suggested they go easy on Hindus suspected of violence, prompting criticism from the Delhi High Court.
Communal clashes in India are not new, with periodic violence erupting from the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. But over the past seven years, observers say, religious polarization fueled by the Modi Party’s Hindu nationalist base has further deepened lines of damage and tensions raised.
Many believe that the catalyst for last year’s riots was a heated speech by Kapil Mishra, a leader of the Modi party. On February 23, 2020, he issued an ultimatum to the police, warning them to break a sit-in by protesters protesting a new citizenship law, according to which Muslims are discriminatory, or he and his supporters would do it themselves .
When his supporters moved, he started street battles that quickly turned into riots. Over the next three days, Hindu crowds stormed the streets, hunting Muslims – in some cases burning them alive in their homes – and burning entire neighborhoods, including shops and mosques.
Mishra rejects the idea that he is responsible for the riots, calling the allegations “propaganda” to cover “the pre-planned genocide of Hindus by Muslims.” On Monday, he said his party had nothing to do with the violence, but added: “What I did last year I will do again if necessary,” referring to his speech hours before the riots broke out.
Many in the Hindu community in the area accuse Muslims of starting violence in an attempt to make India look bad.
At one year, many Muslim victims of the riots are still crowded for fear of future bleeding. Hundreds of people abandoned their flared houses and moved elsewhere. Those who chose to stay fortified their neighborhoods with metal gates in case of several mafia attacks. Many say they fear that those responsible will never be held accountable.
“Everything has changed since the riots,” Khan said. “I think I’m slowly losing all hope of justice.”
Khan spent 20 days recovering in hospital after being shot. Since then, he has been seeking justice, which he says was stopped by police at every turn.
The official complaint of Khan’s police, seen by The Associated Press, named at least six Hindus from his neighborhood who he said had participated in the violence.
“The accused continues to come to my home and threatens to kill my entire family,” Khan said in the complaint, adding that he is willing to identify them in court.
His complaint was never officially accepted.
However, the police filed a complaint on their own. He offered a different version of events and placed Khan at least one kilometer (0.6 miles) from where he was shot, suggesting he was injured in the crossfire between the two clashing groups. He did not identify the attackers.
The stories of many other Muslim victims follow a similar pattern. Police and investigators have rejected hundreds of complaints against Hindu insurgents, citing a lack of evidence despite multiple eyewitness accounts.
Among them are a man who saw his brother shot dead, a father of a 4-month-old baby who witnessed the burning of his house and a young man who lost both arms after Hindu crowds dropped a raw bomb on him. his.
Now, many make weekly trips to the office of lawyer Mehmood Pracha, hoping for justice. Very few have seen their attackers put behind bars. Many others are still waiting for their cases to be heard in court.
Pracha, a Muslim, is at least 100 victims of the riot for free. He said there had been several cases in which police officers were provided with videos of Hindu mobs, many with links to Modi’s party, “but it appears the police were keen to involve Muslims” in the riots.
He said that in many cases, Muslims were “threatened to withdraw their complaints.”
“The police acted as partners in the murder,” Pracha said.
Multiple videos of riots seen by the AP show that police are demanding Hindu mobs to stone Muslims, destroying surveillance cameras and beating a group of Muslim men – one of whom later died.
Several independent fact-finding missions and rights groups have documented the role of the police in riots.
In June 2020, Human Rights Watch said that “the police failed to respond adequately” during the riots and was sometimes “complicit” in attacks on Muslims. He said the authorities “failed to conduct impartial and transparent investigations”.
One recent night, Haroon, who bears only one name, said he was “still afraid to go out in the evening.”
He saw his brother Maroof shot dead by his Hindu neighbors during the riots. Police never identified the accused in his complaint, despite several eyewitnesses.
Haroon, meanwhile, was threatened by police and charged with withdrawing his complaint.
“We were alone then and we are alone now,” he said, almost in tears, as his dead brother’s two children sat beside him.
Haroon looked at them and said, “I don’t know what to do.”