NEW DELHI (AP) – The shooter shouted “Victory to 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 in the bloody eye socket and his fingers slid deep into the wound. At that moment, Khan was sure he would die.
Khan ended up surviving the violence that killed 53 people, mostly fellow Muslims, when he surrounded his neighborhood in the Indian capital twelve months ago.
But a year after India’s worst community unrest in decades, the 35-year-old is still shaken and his attacker still unpunished. Khan says he has not been able to get justice for the lack of interest from the police in his case.
“My only offense is for my name to identify my religion,” Khan said at his home in New Delhi’s North Ghonda district.
Many of the Muslim victims of last year’s bloody violence say they have repeatedly come across police’s refusal to investigate allegations of Hindu unrest. Some hope the courts will continue to help them. But others believe the justice system under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has piled up against them.
To the sense of injustice is added that the accounts of the Muslim victims, as well as the reports of rights groups, have indicated that the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata party in Modi and the New Delhi police force have tacitly supported the Hindu mafias during the fever of violence.
New Delhi police did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but insisted last year that their investigation had been fair and that about 1,750 people had been booked in connection with the riots, half Hindu. Interior Minister 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 seemed to suggest they were easy on Hindus suspected of violence, prompting criticism from the Delhi high court.
Community clashes in India are not new, with periodic violence since the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. But in the last seven years, observers say, religious polarization driven by the Hindu nationalist base of Modi’s party has deepened even more fault lines and high voltages.
Many believe that the catalyst for last year’s riots was a fiery speech by Kapil Mishra, a leader of Modi’s party. On February 23, 2020, he gave an ultimatum to the police, warning them to break a sit-in by protesters protesting a new citizenship law that Muslims say is discriminatory, or they and their supporters.
When his supporters settled in, he provoked street battles that quickly turned into riots. Over the next three days, Hindu crowds swept through the streets persecuting 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 cover up 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 began.
Many in the Hindu community in the area accuse Muslims of initiating violence to try to make India look bad.
A year later, many Muslim victims of the riots remain in hiding for fear of continuing the bloodshed. Hundreds have abandoned their gutted homes and moved elsewhere. Those who chose to stay have fortified their neighborhoods with metal gates in the event of further attacks by people. Many say they fear those responsible will never be held responsible.
“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 receiving a gunshot wound. Since then, he has been seeking justice which he says has been prevented by the police at every turn.
Khan’s official police report, seen by The Associated Press, named at least six Hindus from his neighborhood, according to whom he said they were involved in the violence.
“The accused is 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.
Police, however, filed a complaint on their own. He gave a different version of events and placed Khan at least a kilometer (0.6 mile) from where he was shot, which suggested he was wounded in the crossfire between the two opposing groups. He did not identify his attackers.
The stories of many other Muslim victims follow a similar pattern. Police and investigators have dismissed hundreds of allegations of Hindu riots, citing a lack of evidence despite multiple eyewitnesses.
They include a man who was fatally shot at his brother, a father of a 4-month-old baby who saw his house set on fire and a boy who lost both arms after a Hindu mob threw a raw bomb at him. .
Now, many make weekly trips to the office of lawyer Mehmood Pracha, waiting for justice. Very few have seen their attackers get behind bars. Many others are still waiting for their cases to be known in court.
Pracha, a Muslim, represents at least 100 victims of riots for free. He said there were several occasions when videos were provided to police of Hindu crowds, many with links to Modi’s party, “but it appears the police were eager to involve Muslims” in the riots.
He said in many cases Muslims were also “threatened with withdrawing their complaints”.
“Police have acted as a partner in the crime,” Pracha said.
Several videos of the riots seen by the AP show police demanding Hindu mobs to throw stones at Muslims, destroy surveillance cameras and beat a group of Muslim men, one of whom later died.
Several independent data investigation missions and rights groups have documented the role of the police in the riots.
In June 2020, Human Rights Watch said “police did not respond adequately” during the riots and was sometimes “complicit” in attacks on Muslims. He said authorities “did not conduct impartial and transparent investigations”.
On a recent night, Haroon, who has a name, said he was “still afraid to go out in the evening.”
He saw his brother Maroof fatally shot by his Hindu neighbors during the riots. Police never identified the defendant in his complaint despite several eyewitnesses.
In turn, Haroon said, police and the defendant threatened to withdraw his complaint.
“We were alone then and we are alone now,” she said almost in tears as her dead brother’s two children sat beside her.
Haroon looked at them and said, “I don’t know what to do.”