[Hate crimes have spiked since Mr. Modi took office in 2014. Between May 2015 and December 2018, at least 44 people were killed by cow protection groups, according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch.]
By
Kai Schultz, Suhasini Raj, Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar
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Sardar
Singh Jatav, center, a Dalit who was attacked by upper-caste Hindus last year.
Credit
Atul Loke for The New York Times
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NEW
DELHI — When India released
its annual crime report this week, more than a year behind schedule, certain
pieces of data were conspicuously missing.
Officials in the administration of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi had tracked many types of crimes, but they selectively
released results, choosing to share figures about attacks committed by
left-wing extremists but not religious-based crimes or violence against
journalists.
This comes at a time when there has been a
proliferation of caste-based and religious-based hate crimes. Hindu mobs
continue to beat up and kill members of India’s Muslim minority and its lower
castes, and human rights activists accuse Mr. Modi and his political allies of
stoking an atmosphere of Hindu nationalism that has contributed to the
violence. Most often, the attackers go unpunished.
Some Indians saw the omissions in the crime
data as more evidence that the Modi government is withholding information it
considers incriminating.
“They are suppressing it very blatantly and
very shamelessly,” said Roma Malik, a tribal rights activist. “The government
is shutting down voices of dissent and shrinking democratic space.”
Hate crimes have spiked since Mr. Modi took
office in 2014. Between May 2015 and December 2018, at least 44 people were
killed by cow protection groups, according to a recent report from Human Rights
Watch.
Most of the victims were Muslims accused of
storing beef or transporting cattle for slaughter. Many Hindus, who are about
80 percent of India’s population, consider cows sacred.
In almost all of the attacks, Human Rights
Watch found, the authorities have delayed investigations, and in some cases
justified the attacks or filed charges against the victims’ families.
The Indian Home Affairs Ministry has issued
an annual report on crime data since the 1950s. Compiled by the National Crime
Records Bureau, the report pools together data on thefts, assaults, homicides
and kidnappings from police precincts across the country.
But the 2017 report, which officials planned
to expand with a few dozen new categories, was delayed for more than a year
because of what the Home Affairs Ministry called “errors” and
“inconsistencies.”
On Tuesday, the ministry said that data for
new categories on crimes against journalists, human rights violations by
security forces and attacks by cow vigilantes, among others, had been withheld
because it was “unreliable” and “prone to misinterpretation.”
This is not the first time that Mr. Modi’s
government has been accused of burying bad news.
In January, the government tried to suppress
the release of a damning jobs report that showed unemployment hitting a 45-year
high. The report was eventually leaked to the Indian news media.
Since then, economic malaise has intensified.
Every day brings distressing headlines: the worst auto sales in a decade, banks
on the brink of collapse, soaring unemployment. Mr. Modi remains popular, partly
because he has stoked nationalistic feelings, but that popularity may be
beginning to slip.
On Thursday, early results from state-level
elections in two important states, Haryana, which nearly surrounds the capital,
and Maharashtra, the state that includes Mumbai, indicated that although Mr.
Modi’s party was still the top vote-getter, it had lost several seats. Analysts
said it was the economy.
“The economy is in dire straits, and there
isn’t even an acknowledgment,’’ said Zoya Hasan, a former professor of
political science in New Delhi. “They are in complete denial.’’
Data on hate crimes is becoming a very
sensitive subject in India. A “hate tracker” database published by the
newspaper Hindustan Times was abruptly shut down in 2017, several months after
going up. Last month, a data journalism outlet that compiled similar
information about religion-based attacks pulled down its reporting, too.
“The state denies that these crimes are
happening,” said Vrinda Grover, a lawyer in the Indian Supreme Court.
It is unclear why some new crime categories
were included in the new report, which tops 1,300 pages, and others were not.
One that did make the cut was crimes by
“anti-national elements.” Perpetrators defined as left-wing extremists and
“jihadi terrorists” were responsible for almost 500 attacks across India in
2017, according to the report.
In recent years, the National Crime Records Bureau
has expanded how it studies crime, according to Ish Kumar, who served as its
director from 2017 to 2018. He said the new categories were intended to make
the report more comprehensive and that much of the data could have been left
out because “the police and staff on the ground are not sensitized enough to
handle and report on certain categories.”
Vasudha Gupta, a spokeswoman for the Home
Affairs Ministry, would not answer questions about the data omissions, nor
about how officials had concluded that the “anti-national elements” category
could be included, but not the others.
“Everything is based on fact,” she said. “We
do not have opinions.”
Kai Schultz is a reporter in the South Asia
bureau, based in New Delhi. He has reported from five countries in the region
and previously lived in Kathmandu, Nepal. @Kai_Schultz
Suhasini Raj has worked for over a decade as
an investigative journalist with Indian and international news outlets. Based
in the New Delhi bureau, she joined The Times in 2014.
