Connecting the dots: From ‘Devbhoomi’ to Mumbai, the communal targeting media won't see

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on February 13, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/02/13/connecting-the-dots-from-devbhoomi-to-mumbai-the-communal-targeting-media-wont-see

There is news. And then there is barely any news.

When headlines are dominated by what politicians say, by accusations and counter-accusations, it is virtually impossible to get a sense of what is really going on in this country. Is the Indo-US trade deal all that matters? Are the shenanigans in Parliament, entertaining as they are, making a difference to our lives?

At any time, and especially now, it’s worth spending time looking for news that is barely reported and joining the dots to understand what is happening in India. Not the headline news or the “breaking news” that inundates our timelines. But the developments that affect those not considered important enough to be a part of the news cycle.

Let’s start with the story of ‘Mohammed’ Deepak, the gym trainer in Uttarakhand’s Kotdwar, who intervened to save an elderly Muslim shopkeeper being bullied to change the name of his shop by Bajrang Dal members. This happened on January 26 when India was celebrating Republic Day. Instead of charging the mob that threatened the shopkeeper, the local police filed a case against Deepak.

Yet, Deepak Kumar, a Hindu who, on the spur of the moment, added the prefix ‘Mohammed’ while confronting the mob, has survived because the video of his intervention went viral on social media, and people have stepped up to support him. For instance, after the incident was reported, many local people cancelled their gym memberships. But John Brittas, CPI(M) member of Parliament from Kerala, has taken the initiative to rope in Supreme Court lawyers who have bought annual membership for his gym to help him out, as reported in The Indian Express. 

His troubles might not have ended yet, as another video on social media shows a Hindu Raksha Dal member offering a reward to anyone willing to kill Deepak. As this article by poet Kaushik Raj in The Wire explains, those invested in inflaming passions against Muslims are particularly afraid and angry with Hindus who speak up for their fellow Indians, irrespective of religion. 

But Deepak’s story is an exception. Off the radar, Uttarakhand is one of those states where the attacks on Muslims are growing, encouraged by the lack of action by the police. In this BJP-ruled state, someone who intervenes like Deepak is charged rather than the men who attacked the shopkeeper. 

And while this is happening across the state, all we read about Uttarakhand is in full-page advertisements in many national newspapers, with the faces of the state’s chief minister and the prime minister prominently displayed at the top, and the rest of the advertisement boasting of the state government's achievements.

This piece in the Northern Gazette tells a very different story. 

And this one in Article 14 about the young Kashmiri selling shawls in Uttarakhand who was beaten up for being a Kashmiri Muslim. It also mentions similar incidents against Kashmiri Muslims in Himachal Pradesh.

Then take Odisha, another state that is sometimes in the news for incidents like those taking place in Uttarakhand. “Cattle trading is emerging as a flashpoint, deepening mistrust between majority and minority communities”, writes The Hindu’s Odisha correspondent in this long-form piece after a Muslim cattle trader was beaten to death on January 14 on suspicion of “cattle trafficking”.

Or this disturbing report in Quint of three incidents of mob lynching of Muslims.  The stories are similar. Muslim men were lynched on suspicion of being cow smugglers or of being “illegal Bangladeshis”. 

And this in the Telegraph, about two elderly men and a woman being arrested and deported to Bangladesh on suspicion that they were “illegal” on November 27, 2025. Their families were not informed until two months later that the three had been deported. The son of one of the men deported is quoted as saying: “We are Indian citizens. We vote, we have Aadhaar. But because we are Muslim and speak Bengali, our identity is being questioned.”

And not only Muslims. Odisha has also been in the news for the attack on a Christian pastor in Dhenkanal district, as this report by Citizens for Justice and Peace documents. Typically, while the local police finally registered a case against the attackers, they also registered a case against the victim of the attack, the pastor.

And then look at Assam. It is in the news not just because state elections are around the corner but because Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma finds no reason to hold back in attacking Bengali-speaking Muslims, whom he repeatedly refers to as “Miya”,  in words that ought to be considered hate speech. In this piece in Outlook, Harsh Mander quotes Sarma saying: “My job is to make the Miya people suffer”.

Yet even though there is enough case law to qualify his statements as hate speech, as this article by Ajaz Ashraf in Frontline points out, Sarma continues virtually unscathed.

A particularly poisonous video shared on social media, depicting Sarma doing target practice with a gun on Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam, has been taken down, but it was reported outside India. Besides his divisive statements that always make it to the news, we are getting stories, albeit mainly from independent media platforms, about how the state police are literally pushing suspected “illegal” immigrants across the border into Bangladesh without due process.

There has been enough reporting on communal issues in Uttar Pradesh over the years. Still, this story, of a group of young girls fooling around in Moradabad, gets turned into a communal incident because most of them were Muslim and one was a Hindu, jolts you into realising how far things have gone. They were booked under the anti-conversion law because they were seen putting a burqa on their Hindu friend.

Join the dots on these reports, and the picture that emerges is not of a country that can call itself “Vishwaguru” but one that is rapidly being consumed by communal hatred.

Unfortunately, this diversionary theme of “illegal immigrants” that has been assiduously propagated by the BJP, including by Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah, is now percolating down to the municipal level wherever the BJP has managed to gain control.

The latest in line is Mumbai, a city that knows well the price that is paid by Muslims when any party unfurls the communal flag. Mumbai now has a BJP Mayor, the first time in 44 years, and she has already announced that her first priority is to detect “illegal immigrants”, as reported in this interview in The Indian Express. For a city struggling with enormous civic challenges, including affordable housing and transport, air pollution, perpetually dug-up roads, and more, there is reason for residents of India’s largest city to be apprehensive.

Why the media can’t let Delhi 2020 slip off its radar

Broken News

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/03/12/why-the-media-cant-let-delhi-2020-slip-off-its-radar
(Published on March 12, 2020)

The aim of the carnage was to send out a message to Muslims that there’s no space for them in the public square. We, as journalists, can’t afford to miss such a message.

   

The violence that convulsed North East Delhi in the last week of February might have slipped off the front pages of newspapers and disappeared altogether from television news channels. Yet the story about Delhi 2020, as the violence over those days is now being called, is far from over. In some ways it is just beginning.

Unfortunately, a major weakness of the media in this country is its unwillingness to follow up on issues. Only a few dogged reporters persist, often struggling to get their stories featured in mainstream media.

At such a time, it is gratifying that some digital news platforms, even those struggling to stay afloat financially, and a few newspapers are doing detailed reporting from the ground of what exactly happened over those three days. And the stories are horrifying. This, this, this and this are just a few such reports. They are important because they inform us about what could happen in the future. And there’s little doubt that there is a future for such conflagrations given that there has been no word of sympathy for those who suffered from the governing party at the Centre.

The most chilling of the recent reports from North East Delhi after the killings ended is the one by Arunabh Saikia of Scroll titled “‘I coloured my sword red’: Meet Delhi rioters who say they killed Muslims.” Saikia managed to speak to several men, including one who boasted about killing three Muslim men. Here’s an excerpt that gives a flavour of the article:

At around 10 am, Kumar said he got his first hit. “The Mohammadan was running,” he recalled. “The Hindu public was chasing him. I was leading the pack.”

“I was the first to catch up with him, and hit him with my rod on his head,” he continued, his voice turning shriller and his hands mimicking the strike. “Then he fell down, and the public pounced on him after that…de dhana dhan dhan.”

The story illustrates why what happened cannot be viewed as an aberration, a one-off that will not repeat itself. It underlines that such violence is not the result of one provocative speech, even if the BJP’s Kapil Mishra has to be held to account for the outright provocation in his speech of February 23. It tells us that the seeds of such visceral hatred that can send a man to kill strangers, men he does not know, only because they are “Mohammadan”, were laid over time. And the fruits of that effort are now evident.

A tangential but important detail in the story is the reporter acknowledging that these men spoke openly to him because they identified him as a Hindu by the thread he wore around his wrist.

Should journalists use their religious identity in such situations to gain access? This is not to say Saikia deliberately wore the thread around his wrist. But should journalists reveal their affiliation or identity, and use it to their advantage in certain situations? During the Delhi violence, many journalists were questioned about their religious identities. Others were simply attacked because they were journalists, irrespective of whether they were Hindu or Muslim, as reports on Newslaundry and other platforms have confirmed. But reporters covering communal conflict often face this dilemma.

Another reality that is only just emerging is the impact of communal conflict on women. The stories of what they face often take time to emerge. Women do not speak easily about this, particularly when entire families and neighbourhoods are traumatised and displaced.  But the stories emerge over time as this report suggests.

The details recounted in these reports filed after the violence ended allow us as mediapersons, and readers, to place Delhi 2020 within a larger perspective. For it is not the period of time over which the killings and arson took place, or even their location, but what the pattern of violence tells us about this particular conflagration and what it portends for the future.

Another vexing question that journalists, and media houses, face is the terms that should be used to describe what happened. In Delhi last month, as in several other conflagrations around India, it is virtually impossible to arrive at a definite term. It takes scholars and academics time to study the developments and then decide whether what happened should be described as a “riot”, “communal violence”, or a “pogrom”.

The discussion has already begun and many different perspectives have been articulated even as terms like riot, or pogrom, or sectarian or communal violence are used, often interchangeably, in the same piece.

Ashutosh Varshney, writing in the Indian Express, suggests that the first day of Delhi 2020 was a clash between two groups, pro-CAA and anti-CAA, and thus could be termed a riot, while day two and three “look like a pogrom, as the police watched attacks on the Muslims and was either unable to intervene, or unwilling to do so, while some cops clearly abetted the violence”.

The sociologist Satish Deshpande, on the other hand, in a powerful piece in The Hindu argues that what happened was neither a “riot”, nor “communal violence” nor a “pogrom”.  He writes: “The truth is that we do not have a single word or phrase yet that can name this phenomenon because it is really the newest stage of an ongoing project rather than a standalone event.”

By “ongoing project” Deshpande is referring not just to the period immediately before the violence erupted, but going back to when a justification started to be created for demonising and attacking a particular community, in this case Muslims.

Apart from finding the right term – it’s important and likely to be the subject of considerable debate and difference for some time to come – it is essential that the media unearths all aspects of those terrible three days in Delhi. Given that there are reports that the Delhi police appear to be actively discouraging reporters, and even relief workers, from visiting the worst-affected areas as reported here, there’s more reason to continue digging.

We also have yet to find a reasonable explanation for that strange action by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting against two Malayalam television channels Asianet News and Media One for reporting what they saw during the violence. These channels made no bones about explicitly stating the nature of the structures that were attacked, such as mosques. They also reported that the police stood by and did nothing, a fact noted and reported by several others, including the BBC. But by doing this, the ministry’s order stated, the two channels apparently violated “Rule 6(1)(c) of the Cable Television Networks Rules, 1994, which says that ‘no programme should be carried...which contains attack on religions or communities…’ and Rule 6(1)(e) that says “no programme should be carried...which is likely to encourage or incite violence…’,” according to a report in the Telegraph.

The I&B minister, Prakash Javadekar, claims the decision to suspend the two channels for 48 hours was taken without his consent. One of the channels, Asianet News, is owned by Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a BJP Rajya Sabha member, who is better known as the owner of Republic TV. After Javadekar’s intervention, both channels were restored.

But who gave the order? An overzealous babu? Why was it done in the first place? To send out a message that if the government chose to act in this way, it had the power to do so?

Delhi 2020 is a story that is far from over. From the reasons for the visible civic neglect as reflected in the drains where dead bodies were discovered to the unplanned manner in which such areas grow and flourish even as the rest of the city receives the munificence of tax funds, there is much more to investigate apart from the actual events over those days in February. 

As Satish Deshpande has emphasised, this is not a one-off event. The media needs to be conscious of this. If this is the one lesson to draw from Delhi 2020, it is this. That those days in February might well be the precursor to the days ahead, as the political mood in the country shifts perceptibly towards accepting that the aim of creating a Hindu Rashtra might already have been achieved.

When I asked an elderly Muslim taxi driver in Mumbai who had come to the city from Bihar in the 1980s what he was feeling after hearing about the violence in Delhi, he said, “Behen, what can I say? The Hindu Rashtra is already here. People like us have no place in it.” 

To me, that was the aim of Delhi 2020. To send out that message to Muslims, especially those who had found the courage to take to the street to protest against the CAA. That there was simply no space for them on that street. We, as journalists, cannot afford to miss such a message that speaks to us during and after such tragic events.

Why is India’s media shying away from identifying targets of selective arson in Delhi?

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/02/27/why-is-indias-media-shying-away-from-identifying-targets-of-selective-arson-in-delhi

(Published on Feb 27, 2020)

It has been a tumultuous three days. The American president flew in and out of India. He and Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugged each other and spoke at the “world’s largest cricket stadium” in Ahmedabad on February 24. The media, as expected, gave it wall-to-wall coverage. The rest of India disappeared, momentarily.

And then it appeared, in all its viciousness, not in a remote part of the country, but under the noses of the most powerful men in India and probably the most powerful man in the world.

Let’s just speculate for a moment. If the Trump-Modi jugalbandi, or “bromance” as some people have called it, had not occupied almost the entire media space, is it possible the media would have paid heed to the early warnings of the violence that has convulsed a part of the national capital?

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Kapil Mishra gave an open call to arms on Sunday, February 23. He did it before the media and cameras and with a senior police official by his side. The latter watched and listened even as Mishra issued an ultimatum to the police to clear the anti-CAA protesters at Jaffarabad.

Given that the Delhi police are only too willing to arrest all manner of so-called “anti-nationals” for provocative utterances, it is beyond belief that Mishra’s statement did not warrant any response. But we also know why it did not.

But what if the police had acted on that day? The tension around Jaffarabad would not have disappeared but a clear message would have been sent out that no one can take the law into their hands.

That, however, was not to be. Instead, weapons were gathered, and men armed with lathis, iron rods and sacks of broken bricks were ready to begin their assault. They could not wait until Donald Trump had left. Even as the US president obfuscated at his press conference about what he thought of the CAA, and continued to lavish praise on Modi for his commitment to religious tolerance, the lanes of North East Delhi exploded into vicious communal violence.

By then the media, mostly headquartered in Delhi, simply could not ignore it. In between reports of what Trump did, what he said, what he ate, we began to see visuals of the ugly side of religious intolerance being played out barely 14 km from the pomp and luxury of Lutyens’ Delhi.

In many ways, the contrast that we saw on television screens on February 25 is India’s reality. The bluster and bombast of the rulers, who are but men placed in power by ordinary people, and the bloodlust and hate let loose by these very men and their followers as it translates into targeted and vicious violence on India’s minorities.

The media’s role at such times becomes even more important. In the past, the media has been blamed for inflaming passions. And rightly so. At the same time, given the pattern of such clashes, should the media cover up what it sees, or report it for what it is?

I refer specifically to incidents of arson that have been reported. Journalists have seen young men with petrol bombs that they fling with impunity into houses or shops. But are these just random targets? 

Clearly not. In 1984, during the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi that raged for three days following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Sikh homes, shops and gurudwaras were specifically targeted and firebombed.

This pattern was repeated during the 1992-93 riots that took place in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid’s demolition in Mumbai. There, Muslim-owned shops and restaurants were picked out for arson, standing out as black holes in a row of other establishments left untouched.

In Gujarat 2002, this was amply visible in many cities. And in major communal conflagrations since then we have noted this.

Therefore, why would journalists shy away from pointing out the targets of the selective arson? On NDTV, for instance, even though arson was mentioned, the reporters were at pains to either cover up the target – a religious place or a building – or went to great lengths to suggest the issue was not who owned the place that had been firebombed but the commercial value of what was lost. 

The explanation that giving specific details would inflame passions does not pass muster. We are not reporting who did it until it’s confirmed, but surely we can see who owns these places, and also note the pattern.

This report in Hindustan Times also alerts us to this pattern.  According to it, in some localities, saffron flags were placed on Hindu homes and shops a day before the violence, clearly leaving out those owned by Muslims.

A phrase that crops up with regularity when such violence is covered is “senseless”. How is this violence “senseless”? It has been planned and instigated, with some future benefit in mind.

This time it is clearly to put fear in the hearts of Muslims, who are already terrified at the prospect of the National Register of Citizens being pushed through. It is to make it clear to them that they cannot come out and protest, a right guaranteed every citizen. Justice P Nandrajog, who recently retired as chief justice of the Bombay High Court, reiterated this in an interview with the Indian Express, “Everyone has a right to protest against a government policy…people have the right to support it as well. Both sides are entitled to project their views…As long as it is a reasonable view, the government cannot say that it will not let certain people project their view."

The one aspect that stands out as different so far in the Delhi violence is the way the media has been treated. In Gujarat in 2002, for instance, journalists were beaten up by the police on one occasion as this report records, and there were reports of intimidation. A Muslim journalist wrote about his near escapes from mobs while reporting in Gujarat at that time.

In Mumbai in 1992, some journalists faced threats but nowhere close to what journalists have experienced in Delhi. For journalists to be asked their identity, for their phones to be snatched, to be beaten by rods, to be shot – this is a new and worrying development.

Not so, I must point out, for journalists in Kashmir. In fact, even as we in the media protest about what our colleagues have had to go through in Delhi, let us pause and remember our friends and counterparts in Kashmir.

It is so easy to forget Kashmir. And we continue to do so.

For more than 200 days, journalists in Kashmir have had to struggle to do their jobs, to find ways to access information, to upload their stories and photographs – a herculean task in their circumstances with painfully slow internet. Little by way of solidarity for their struggles emerges from the Indian media.

They have also faced intimidation, not from rightwing mobs as in Delhi, but from the security forces as this report by the Free Speech Collective documents. They are being bullied into revealing their sources and they have been detained for what they report. Nothing is “normal” for a Kashmiri journalist. 

Remembering their plight will offer us some perspective on how journalists are prevented from doing their jobs in multiple ways. In Kashmir, the establishment uses the security forces as an instrument of intimidation. In Delhi, it uses its rabid followers to do the same.

Let me end with where I began, the visit of Trump to India, which he said was “great” so many times that the adjective has lost any meaning. At the press conference, before he went to Rashtrapati Bhawan for his last engagement, he was asked a question by a CNN reporter. This network and Trump have had a long and combative relationship. Thus, not surprisingly, Trump went into attack mode even as the question was asked, accusing CNN of lying. To which the reporter responded, “Our record on delivering the truth is a lot better than yours.”

Just speculate for a moment: could this ever happen in India if, even though it’s highly unlikely, the prime minister holds a press conference?

A Book of Memory and Forgetting

Published in Economic and Political Weekly

Splintered Justice: Living the Horror of Mass Communal Violence in Bhagalpur and Gujarat by Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha; New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2016, pp 221, Rs 500 (paperback).

Does anyone even remember the communal violence that tore apart Bhagalpur in Bihar in 1989?  According to official estimates, around 250 villages and 50,000 people were affected.  The official death toll was estimated to be over 900 although the unofficial toll was higher.  It was familiar story because it had happened before.  And since then it has happened again.  And will do so in the future.

The partition of India after the British left is now history.  But every day there are partitions taking place in independent India, where people who have coexisted, tolerated difference, even celebrated it, are now being forced into separate territories, their differences highlighted and exacerbated by a dominant politics that has given a new twist to the old divide and rule policy of the British.

Why is it important to record these divisions, these conflicts that recur with such worrying frequency?  Would it not be better to erase these memories and look ahead? 

The writers of this book demonstrate convincingly why incidents of mass violence must be recorded and followed up.  If they are not, then history will only remember the version of the victors while the victims will continue to remain voiceless, unheard, without justice.

In this regard, the book under review serves an important purpose.  It is a record of the communal killings in Bhagalpur in 1989, and in Gujarat 2002. But instead of going over familiar ground, the authors help us understand the legacy of such mass violence.  These recorded memories show us the costs of a broken criminal justice system and the price that victims of mass violence continue to pay for decades.

Although a great deal has been written about the mass violence in Gujarat in 2002, not that much is known about Bhagalpur. Yet, this is a good time to remember it as the issues that triggered the violence are alive today, and are likely to be ratcheted up in the next two years leading up to the next general election in 2019.  In fact, with the Supreme Court having ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to speed up hearings in the two cases on the destruction of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, the central controversy over the building of the Ram temple on the site of the demolished mosque will remain alive.

Fertiliser of Communalism

Bhagalpur happened before the Babri Masjid was destroyed.  It was one of the many incidents of rioting triggered by the frenzy that the Sangh Parivar built up by mobilising Hindus on the Ram temple issue.  While the embers of the communal killings in Bhagalpur were still glowing, L. K. Advani of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) launched a rath yatra to build up support for the temple in September 1990. It culminated in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 when thousands of kar sevaks converged on the Babri Masjid and carried out their well laid plan to destroy it even as senior BJP leaders, including Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharati stood by watching and even cheering.

The commission of inquiry set up by the Bihar government to look at the Bhagalpur riots in 1990 concluded that the Ram temple movement was the trigger that set off the killings and that it was "acting as a fertiliser to give nourishment to the soil of Indian communalism" (p28-29).  The commission also noted the failure of the district administration and the police to control the fraught situation in Bhagalpur.

One of the authors, Warisha Farasat, a trained lawyer, visited Bhagalpur in March 2011, 22 years later, to find that the "wounds are still raw, the hearts charred" (p 31).  Farasat sought out men and women who remembered what happened, who had witnessed the killings, who had attempted to seek justice through the legal system, and who were left only with bitter memories. As in other similar situations after a communal massacre, some of the victims decided to go back to their own villages while others moved on, fearful of returning to a place where even trusted neighbours had turned on them.

The exercise of looking at Bhagalpur and Gujarat together establishes several common threads. Irrespective of the party in power in the state or the centre, the system followed a similar pattern. At the time of the Bhagalpur killings, there was a Congress government at the centre headed by Rajiv Gandhi and a Congress government in Bihar headed by Satyendra Narayan Sinha.  In Gujarat in 2002, when the communal violence occurred, the BJP was in power in the state with Narendra Modi as Chief Minister and a National Democratic Alliance government headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee was at the centre.  In both instances, the party in the state and the centre were the same.

Yet, whether it was a Congress government or a BJP government, the state machinery was equally irresponsive. In both Bhagalpur and Gujarat, the cases filed after the riots by the victims mostly failed and were delayed for so long as to lose any meaning. In both places, victims had similar experiences in the course of seeking justice. For instance, they had a hard time getting FIRs recorded by an unsympathetic police.  Even if they succeeded, they would find later that the information in them was either wrong or incomplete. There were several instances of omnibus FIRs that clubbed the complaints of several victims together even if individually, these men and women had identified their killers by name, as they were people known to them.

Indifferent Prosecution

Many cases were closed because an indifferent prosecution did not put forward a convincing argument while the accused had private lawyers with the ability to browbeat and intimidate the witnesses.  Even where cases were reopened, through the intervention of civil society groups as in Gujarat, or by a different state government as in the Bihar under Nitish Kumar, many of the original witnesses had either turned hostile and were unwilling to testify, or had died, thereby weakening the cases. 

In both Bhagalpur and Gujarat, the story of inadequate compensation for loss of life and property is virtually identical.  In many cases, the information that should have been in the FIRs was simply not there because the police had not recorded it.  There were no surveys to assess damage apart from loss of life, and no one informed the victims of the processes they needed to undertake to access the compensation.  As a result, only a small percentage of the affected actually received the compensation to which they were legally entitled even if these amounts were far from sufficient and did not compensate for the real losses that they had incurred.

The book records the Gujarat government's shocking decision to differentiate between the victims of the Godhra train fire, all Hindus, and of the subsequent killings, all Muslims.  While the families of the former were given Rs 2 lakh, the families of the killings that followed Godhra were given only Rs 1 lakh.  Only after an uproar and civil society intervention did the government concede that both should receive equal amounts, fixed at Rs 1.5 lakh.

In Bhagalpur, where civil society presence was minimal and only one human rights group, the People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) sent a team to study and record the incidents of sexual violence, the fate of the victims was even worse.  In moving testimonies recorded by Farasat, we hear the hopelessness of people who have lost everything -- members of their family, their homes, the tools of their trade -- and given practically nothing by way of compensation. 

In the chapter titled, "The Unhealed Wounds of Bhagalpur", Farasat relates the case of Ali Ahmad of Shahpur Tamouni.  Both his parents were killed by a Hindu mob.  Seven months later, he received a cheque of Rs 3,500 as compensation. "That was the value the state put on two human being killed", writes Farasat (p 89).  Nothing was given to him for the 20 cows and bulls, the agricultural machinery and other valuable and household items that they had lost.

When the Bihar government under Nitish Kumar reopened some of the Bhagalpur cases in 2006, people did receive higher compensation.  But many missed out on this as they did not have the requisite paper work, nor did they know what they should do to avail of the higher amount.  The state too did not help as much as it could have. For instance, even though the government's policy acknowledges that an FIR is not the only proof of murder, and that other evidence must also be taken into account, in compensation cases for loss of life, only the FIR is accepted.  This is despite knowing that in communal riots, police simply do not register FIRs.

The strength of this book is that it does not depend only on secondary information.  It is a follow up to an earlier study by the Centre for Equity Studies based on legal documents, several obtained through Right to Information (RTI) applications.  They looked at Nellie, 1983; Delhi, 1984; Bhagalpur, 1989 and Gujarat, 2002.  This information was assembled in the book "On Their Watch: Mass Violence and State Apathy in India" (Chopra, Jha, 2014). The book under review goes further by including the testimonies of the victims of Bhagalpur and Gujarat recorded by the authors. 

Role of Judiciary

An important point that Prita Jha makes in her section on Gujarat is the role of the judiciary.  Not all judges were hostile, as victims told the writers.  In fact, many felt that the only people sympathetic and willing to listen to their story during the court hearings were the judges as the police was usually hostile, the prosecutors unhelpful and the defence aggressive. 

Jha mentions the remarkable judgment delivered on 29 August 2012 by Jyotsna Patnaik in the Naroda Patiya case in which 97 Muslims were killed in one day.  Patnaik convicted 32 people, including Maya Kodnani, a minister in Modi's government, and Babu Bajrangi of the Bajrang Dal. In her historic judgment, Patnaik calls 28 February 2002, the beginning of the Gujarat violence, as "the day of a cyclone of violence, one of the black chapters in the history of democratic India when violation of human rights and Constitutional rights was publicly done by the assaulters on the victims" (p 167).

In the course of the trial, Patnaik was aware of the problems victims faced in registering their cases with the state machinery and intervened often to ensure that victims would be able to speak instead of being bullied by the defence.  In doing this she was implementing the spirit of the 2004 Supreme Court directive in the Best Bakery case relating to the killing of 14 Muslims. Both the trial court in Vadodara and the Gujarat High Court had absolved all those accused, as the main witness had turned hostile. After going through the proceedings of the courts in Gujarat, the apex court ordered a retrial in a fast track court in Maharashtra headed by Justice Abhay Mahadeo Thipsay, who recognised that the investigation into the case had been defective.  He convicted nine of the accused.   

In its 2004 judgment, the apex court criticised the Gujarat High Court judge who heard the case and also the investigation and prosecution of the case by the state machinery. Justice Arijit Prasayat's observations on the role of a judge in a criminal trial are as pertinent today as they were when the judgment was delivered.  He said,

"If a criminal court is to be an effective instrument in dispensing justice, the presiding judge must cease to be a spectator and a mere recording machine by becoming a participant in the trial evincing intelligence, active interest and elicit all relevant material necessary for reaching the correct conclusion, to find out the truth and administer justice with fairness and impartiality both to the parties and to the community it serves. Courts administering criminal justice cannot turn a blind eye to vexatious or oppressive conduct that has occurred in relation to proceedings" (p 165).

There is a great deal of thoughtful material in this slim book and given the times we live in, what it contains becomes all the more relevant.  Apart from the way in which complicit state authorities have permitted these incidents of mass violence to rage on, the criminal justice system and an unsympathetic state machinery revisits violence on the people who have already suffered it.  This has to be fixed.

Reference:

Chopra, Surabhi and Prita Jha, 2014; On Their Watch: Mass Violence and State Apathy in India, New Delhi: Three Essays Collective.