NEW DELHI (AP) – The shooter shouted “Victory to Lord Ram”, the Hindu god, before pulling the trigger that fired a bullet into Mohammed Nasir Khan’s left eye.
Khan put his trembling hand on his bloodied orbit and his fingers slid deep into the wound. At that point, Khan was sure he was going to die.
Khan eventually survived the violence that killed 53 others, mostly fellow Muslims, when it engulfed his 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 shocked and his attacker is still going unpunished. Khan says he has been unable to get justice due to a lack of police interest in his case.
“My only crime is that my name identifies my religion,” Khan said at home in New Delhi’s North Ghonda neighborhood.
Many of the Muslim victims of last year’s bloody violence say they have repeatedly encountered a police refusal to investigate complaints 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 has piled up against them.
Adding to the sense of injustice, reports of Muslim victims and reports from rights groups have indicated that leaders of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party and New Delhi police tacitly supported Hindu gangs during the frenetic violence.
New Delhi police did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but last year they insisted that their investigation had been fair and that nearly 1,750 people had been booked in connection with the riots, half of them Hindus. Home Secretary G. Kishan Reddy has also told Parliament that the police acted promptly and impartially.
But a letter sent to the detectives by a senior police officer five months after the riots seemed to suggest that they would take it easy against Hindus suspected of violence, prompting criticism from the Delhi Supreme Court.
Communal clashes in India are not new, with periodic violence erupting since the British partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. But over the past seven years, observers say, religious polarization has fueled the Hindu nationalist base of Modi’s party’s cleavages and increased tensions.
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 issued an ultimatum to police, warning them to break a sit-in by protesters protesting a new citizenship law that Muslims say is discriminatory, or he and his supporters would do it themselves.
When his supporters came in, it sparked battles that soon turned into riots. For the next three days, Hindu gangs raged through the streets to hunt down 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, calling the claims “propaganda” to cover up the “preplanned 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 started.
Many in the Hindu community in the area accuse Muslims of initiating the violence in an attempt to make India look bad.
A year later, many Muslim victims of the riots are still huddled for fear of further bloodletting. Hundreds have left their gutted homes and moved elsewhere. Those who chose to stay have fortified their neighborhoods with metal gates in case there are more mafia attacks. Many say they fear those responsible will never be held accountable.
“Everything has changed since the riots,” Khan said. “I think I am slowly losing all hope for justice.”
Khan spent 20 days in the hospital after being shot. Since then he has been seeking justice which he says is bothered by the police every time.
Khan’s official police complaint, seen by The Associated Press, mentioned at least six Hindus from his area who he says were involved in the violence.
“The accused are still coming to my house threatening me with the murder of my entire 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 themselves filed a complaint. It gave a different version of the events and places Khan at least a kilometer (0.6 mi) from where he was shot, suggesting 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 detectives have dismissed hundreds of complaints against Hindu rioters, citing a lack of evidence despite multiple eyewitness accounts.
They include a man who saw his brother fatally shot, a father of a four-month-old baby who saw his house set on fire, and a young boy who lost both his arms after Hindu gangs threw a crude bomb at him.
Now many make weekly trips to attorney Mehmood Pracha’s office, hoping for justice. Few have seen their attackers behind bars. Many others are still waiting for their cases to be heard in court.
Pracha, a Muslim, represents at least 100 riot victims for free. He said there were several instances where police received videos of Hindu gangs, many with links to Modi’s party, “but it appears the police were keen to involve Muslims” in the riots.
He said Muslims were also in many cases “threatened to withdraw their complaints.”
“The police have acted as partners in crime,” said Pracha.
Multiple videos of the riots seen by the AP show police urging Hindu gangs to throw stones at Muslims, destroy surveillance cameras and beat a group of Muslim men – one of whom later died.
Multiple 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 the authorities “have not conducted impartial and transparent investigations.”
Recently, Haroon, bearing the same name, said he was still afraid to go out at night.
He saw his brother Maroof being fatally shot by his Hindu neighbors during the riots. Police never identified the suspect in his complaint, despite multiple eyewitnesses.
In turn, Haroon said, he was threatened by police and the suspect to drop his complaint.
“We were alone then and now we are alone,” he said almost in tears as his dead brother’s two children sat next to him.
Haroon looked at them and said, “I don’t know what to do.”