Muslims, who form 15 per cent of India’s 1.3 billion population, are down in the doleful dumps. First came the November 2019 Babri Masjid verdict in favour of Hindus, sending shockwaves in the largest religious minority community in the biggest democracy in the world.
Just a month later, even as Muslims were wondering whether the Narendra Modi government had reduced them to second-class citizens, yet another bolt was fired at them in the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that allowed all but Muslim refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to gain fast-track citizenship of India.
The controversial CAA ignited a wave of peaceful protests across India with Muslim women taking to streets and beginning indefinite sit-ins at various places across the country asking the government to revoke the ‘discriminatory’ law which went against the secular and democratic spirit of the Constitution of the country.
For two months, Muslims and their allies across the country kept staging protests against the new citizenship law, the CAA, and other executive exercises like the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register, which were seen as discriminatory against the community.
Angered by the demonstrations, senior leaders and ministers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in their provocative speeches, exhorted their frenzied supporters to shoot the protesters. BJP’s rabble-rousing leader Kapil Mishra even held out a warning to the Delhi police and threatened violence by saying that he would take the law into his own hands if the cops failed to disperse the anti-CAA protesters.
On February 23, bloody riots broke out in North-East Delhi with clashes between supporters and protesters of CAA at Jaffrabad soon spreading to other areas, leaving a trail of death and destruction in what turned out to be the largest outbreak of Hindu-Muslim violence in Delhi since Partition.
The minority community bore the brunt in the Delhi riots that continued for a week and left 53 people dead and some 400 others bruised and battered. The government’s own data revealed that 77 per cent of the civilians killed were Muslims, 85-95 per cent of the properties damaged belonged to Muslims, and only Muslim shrines were desecrated.
As many as 1,571 people have been hauled up and 751 FIRs were registered for which a large number of people, mostly Muslims, continue to be interrogated and arrested, as conspirators and provocateurs, and they include youngsters from the Muslim community, senior activists, academics, writers, professors, cultural artistes and trade-unionists who supported the anti-CAA protests.
Muslim women, peacefully protesting discriminations based on religion, were lodged for months in jail, by the Delhi police notorious for coercing confessional statements to manufacture evidence overseen as it is by the Union Home Ministry under Amit Shah.
Indeed, in the past six months, under the cover of coronavirus lockdown, many young Muslim students and activists have been arrested under the draconian, no-bail anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and most of them, including Gulfisha Fatima (student, Delhi University), Ishrat Jahan (Congress activist), Khalid Saifi (United Against Hate), Meeran Haider (President, RJD Youth Wing, Delhi), Asif Tanha (Jamia student), Sharjeel Imam (JNU scholar), Shifa-Ur-Rehman (President, Jamia Alumni Association) continue to languish in jail.
The latest in the spate of arbitrary detention and grilling of anti-CAA activists and students was the September 13 arrest of Dr Umar Khalid, a young social justice activist and doctorate in tribal rights, after 11 hours of intense interrogations, triggering protests from several individuals and organisations who firmly believe that the Delhi police have arrested him on the basis of manufactured evidence through coerced statements, falsely accusing him of being the ‘mastermind’ behind the Delhi riots of February 2020.
The hounding of Muslim activists and students like Khalid is aimed at the relentless silencing of young and progressive voices by the Modi regime, many of whom happen to be Muslims, students, activists and academics. By arbitrarily arresting outspoken activists, the government is not only attempting to silence dissent but also sending a message to Hindu fanatics that they have a free rein to commit abuses against the minority community.
Shockingly, Safoora Zargar, a pregnant student, was arrested by the police under the UAPA and even sent to jail during the coronavirus pandemic but till now, the three BJP leaders — Kapil Mishra, Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma — who incited violence with their offensive hate speeches have not been collared or questioned by the Delhi police.
There are more than one lakh cases registered against Muslims in connection with the anti-CAA protests in Uttar Pradesh alone but the authorities’ prejudice against the minority was also exposed when Gorakhpur doctor-activist Dr. Kafeel Khan was arrested for the speech he delivered at the Aligarh Muslim University but Yogendra Yadav who also expressed similar views at the same venue went scot-free.
Truth to tell, the Modi regime and BJP-ruled states are becoming more and more intolerant of any dissent or opposition by even peaceful protesters who rightly apprehend injustices born from bias and hate against the minority community.
In other words, the Modi administration will do well to immediately stop the witch-hunt of activists and journalists under the draconian UAPA, release all arrested activists and political prisoners in fabricated cases, take immediate action against all the perpetrators of violence in North-East Delhi under the garb of cracking down on Anti-CAA protests, and repeal all draconian laws like UAPA.