NEW DELHI (AP) – The shooter shouted ‘Victory to Lord Ram’, the Hindu god, before pulling the trigger that sent a bullet into Muhammad Nasir Khan’s left eye.
Khan places his trembling hand on his bloody eye socket and his fingers slide deep into the wound. At that moment, Khan was sure he was going to die.
Khan eventually survived the violence that killed 53 other people, mostly fellow Muslims, when it engulfed his neighborhood in the Indian capital 12 months ago.
But a year after India’s worst community riot in decades, the 35-year-old is still being shaken and his attacker still unpunished. Khan says he could not get it right due to the lack of interest from the police in his case.
“My only crime is that my name identifies my religion,” Khan said at his home in the North Ghonda area of New Delhi.
Many of the Muslim victims of bloody violence last year say they are refusing the police to investigate charges against Hindu rioters. Some hope the courts will still come to their aid. But others now believe that the legal system under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government is stacked against them.
An addition to the sense of injustice is that reports from Muslim victims as well as reports from rights groups indicate that leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party of Modi and the police in New Delhi tacitly supported the Hindu crowd during the feverish violence.
New Delhi police did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but insisted last year that their investigation was fair and that nearly 1,750 people had been booked in connection with the riots – half of them Hindus. Junior Home Secretary G. Kishan Reddy also told parliament that the police acted quickly and impartially.
But a letter a senior police officer sent to investigators five months after the riots suggested they could easily tackle the Hindus suspected of violence, which drew criticism from the Delhi High Court.
Common clashes in India are not new, with periodic violence erupting since the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. But observers say the past seven years have seen religious polarization fueled by Modi’s Hindu nationalist base, the fault lines and increased voltage.
Many believe the catalyst for riots last year was a fiery speech by Kapil Mishra, a leader of Modi’s party. On February 23, 2020, he issued an ultimatum to the police and warned them to break a sit-up by protesters protesting against a new citizenship law that Muslims say is discriminatory, otherwise he and his supporters would do it themselves.
When his supporters moved in, it caused street fights that quickly turned into riots. For the next three days, Hindu crowds chased through streets chasing Muslims – in some cases burning them alive in their homes and setting fire to entire neighborhoods, including shops and mosques.
Mishra rejects the idea that he is responsible for the riots and calls the allegations ‘propaganda’ to disguise the ‘premeditated genocide of Hindus by Muslims’. On Monday, he said his party had no ties to the violence, but added: “what I did last year, I will do it again if necessary,” referring to his speech hours before the riots began. .
Many in the Hindu community in the area accuse Muslims of starting the violence to make India look bad.
A year later, there are many Muslim victims of the riots who are still suffering for fear of further bloodshed. Hundreds left their cluttered homes and moved elsewhere. Those who preferred to stay reinforced their neighborhoods with metal gates in case of more mob attacks. Many say they are afraid 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 recovered in hospital for 20 days after being shot. Since then, he has been seeking justice, which he says has been hampered by every police operation.
Khan’s official police complaint, seen by The Associated Press, mentions at least six Hindus from his area who he said took part in the violence.
“The accused are still coming to my house and threatening to kill my whole family,” Khan said in the complaint, adding that he was willing to identify them in court.
His complaint was never officially accepted.
However, the police lodged a complaint on their own. It gives a different account of the events and places Khan at least a kilometer from where he was shot, indicating that he was injured in the crossfire between the two colliding groups. It did not identify its attackers.
The stories of many other Muslim victims follow a similar pattern. Police and investigators have dismissed hundreds of charges against Hindu rioters, citing a lack of evidence despite several eyewitness reports.
These include a man who saw his brother fatally shot, a father of a 4-month-old baby who saw his house burn down and a young boy who lost both his arms after Hindu mob beat him threw a crude bomb.
Now many travel to the office of lawyer Mehmood Pracha every week in the hope of justice. Very few have seen their attackers put behind bars. Many others are still awaiting trial.
Pracha, a Muslim, represents at least 100 victims of riots for free. He said several times videos of Hindu crowds had been provided to the police, many of which had links to Modi’s party, “but the police seem eager to involve Muslims” in the riots.
He said that in many cases Muslims were also “threatened to withdraw their complaints.”
“The police acted as partners in crime,” Pracha said.
Several videos of the riots seen by the AP show how the police are demanding the Hindu crowd to stone Muslims, destroy the cameras and beat 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 the riots.
In June 2020, Human Rights Watch said that the police did not respond adequately during the riots and were sometimes “complicit” in attacks on Muslims. It said authorities “did not conduct impartial and transparent investigations.”
On a recent night, Haroon, who mentions one name, said he was “still scared to go out in the evening.”
He saw his brother Maroof fatally shot by his Hindu neighbors during the riots. Police never identified the accused in his charge, despite several eyewitnesses.
In turn, Haroon said, he was threatened by the police and the accused to withdraw his charge.
“We were alone then and we are alone now,” he said almost in tears as the two children of his deceased brother sat next to him.
Haroon looks at them and says, “I do not know what to do.”