[As demonstrations over a citizenship law
sweep India, more accounts are emerging of mistreatment and harsh tactics by
police and state officials.]
By
Kai Schultz and Sameer Yasir
 |
|
Police officers stationed
outside a mosque in Nehtaur, India, in Uttar Pradesh state.
Credit Saumya Khandelwal
for The New York Times
|
NAGINA,
India — The teens were
trapped.
As the protest broke up, Indian police
officers in the town of Nagina chased a group of Muslim teenagers into an empty
house. They grabbed them and took them to a makeshift jail. And then, the boys
and community leaders said, the officers tortured them.
Four of the boys, who ranged in age from 13
to 17, said in interviews with The New York Times that police officers used
wooden canes to beat them and threatened to kill them for taking part in
demonstrations against a divisive citizenship law that has fueled rallies and
rioting across India. Three had obvious signs of deep bruising or other
injuries.
Many Indians fear that the new law, which is
seen as a huge political victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu
nationalist base, is blatantly discriminatory toward Muslims and threatens the
very foundation of India as a secular and tolerant nation.
In Uttar Pradesh, the northern Indian state
where Nagina is and the one with the most Muslim residents, the rioting has
been among the most intense, and the violent backlash from the police has been
the most deadly and troubling.
According to accounts by the detained boys in
Nagina, along with family members and other officials in their town who spoke
to them immediately after they were released, police officers over the course
of 30 hours terrorized them and others who had been demonstrating on Dec. 20.
Police officials in the town deny that any
abuse happened, or that minors had been detained at all around that time.
According to two of the boys, the officers
laughed during beatings, saying, “You will die in this prison.”
“They were so scared that hardly anyone could
speak,” said Khalil-ur-Rehman, a municipal officer in Nagina who met the
children at a police station as soon as they were released on Dec. 22. “How do
you justify detaining minors, let alone beating them black and blue?”
As the Indian authorities struggle to contain
the nationwide protests, more accounts are emerging of abuse meted out by
police officers.
According to interviews with more than three
dozen people in several Uttar Pradesh towns, almost all the violence has been
directed toward Muslim residents. More people — at least 19 — have been killed
in this state during the protests than anywhere else in India.
Witnesses said that police officers opened
fire on demonstrators with live ammunition, broke into houses and stole money,
and threatened to rape women. The BBC aired footage showing police officers
knocking down security cameras in a Muslim neighborhood and shattering the
windows of parked cars.
The Indian news media has reported that Uttar
Pradesh police officers were encouraged by their superiors to kill protesters
engaged in violence, but that innocent people were also targeted. In one case,
officers smacked a 72-year-old Muslim man with a rifle butt, telling him,
“Muslims have only two places: Pakistan or the graveyard.”
Harsh Mander, a human rights activist who
formerly worked in India’s civil service, said he visited homes resembling “wastelands,”
where the police had destroyed kitchens, smashed television sets and threatened
to seize property. He said the authorities had interpreted the citizenship law
as giving them license to force Muslims into neighboring Pakistan and, as they
see it, “settle the unfinished business of Partition.”
“The police have become a lynch mob,” he
said.
Police and state officials have denied using
excessive force or singling out Muslims. They have emphasized the need to
preserve order and protect innocent people against “radical groups” with
“deep-rooted conspiracies” to commit violent acts.
“The kind of action the government is taking
against rioters has become an example for the entire country,” read a Friday
tweet from the office of Yogi Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister and a
close ally of Mr. Modi.
But many residents accuse Uttar Pradesh
officials of mounting an organized campaign to terrify Muslims into submission.
The new citizenship bill, which creates a special path for non-Muslim migrants
in India to receive citizenship, has provoked the biggest backlash Mr. Modi has
faced since becoming prime minister in 2014.
In Uttar Pradesh, where destructive riots
erupted and protesters vandalized property, there is a growing number of
accounts of police officers having been given the green light by senior
officials to use harsh measures.
In an audio recording that some residents and
officials say features the voice of Sanjeev Tyagi, the superintendent of police
in the Bijnor district, which includes Nagina, a man orders police officers to
“break the arms and legs of those throwing stones at police stations.”
“Go and fix them,” he said.
Mr. Tyagi looked surprised and a bit
disturbed when asked, during an interview with The New York Times, about this
recording. He declined to say whether his was the voice on the recording, which
one officer, who spoke on condition of
anonymity to avoid reprisals, said had been radioed out to the police force.
Since then it has been widely shared on social media.
After India’s Parliament passed the
Citizenship Amendment Act on Dec. 11, hundreds of thousands of protesters
poured into the streets in many cities across the country to oppose the law,
which favors every major South Asian faith over Islam.
Mr. Modi has defended the law, saying that it
would not strip citizenship from India’s Muslims and that it was intended to
help religious minorities fleeing persecution in neighboring Muslim-majority
countries. He said those protesting the bill were “spreading lies.”
On Dec. 19, Mr. Adityanath, a monk and
staunch Hindu nationalist, publicly urged the state police to “take revenge” on
protesters who were vandalizing public property. Mr. Adityanath has called
Muslims “a crop of two-legged animals that has to be stopped.” During his
tenure as chief minister, the state police have killed dozens of suspects in
altercations known in India as police “encounters.”
On the afternoon of Dec. 20, as Friday Prayer
ended and people began to hit the streets across Uttar Pradesh to protest the
citizenship bill, violence exploded in several towns at the same time.
Thousands of officers were deployed.
At the Jama mosque in Nagina, protesters soon
found themselves surrounded by the police. More than a hundred were detained
and bused to an empty badminton court, where they were beaten with bamboo
canes, witnesses said.
At least 21 teenagers were among the group,
according to the four boys who were interviewed. Adult family members were with
them during the interviews.
One of the detainees, a 15-year-old boy who
showed reporters deep bruises on his leg, said police officers seemed most
provoked by those who did not initially cry.
“Everyone was screaming,” said the boy, whose
identity is being withheld because he is a minor and fears punishment by
officials. “They forced us to drink bottles of water and then they would beat
us when we asked to go to the bathroom.”
Another detainee, a 16-year-old with a
bandaged hand that he believed had been broken, said that a few police officers
had tried to stop the abuse but were outnumbered. He said officers seemed to
enjoy depriving them of sleep and making them cold.
In the interview, Mr. Tyagi, the police
superintendent for the Bijnor district, denied that minors were among the
people detained then, calling those reports “totally baseless.”
Mr. Tyagi stated that protesters in Nagina
had gotten out of control, posing a risk. He shared videos that showed
protesters rampaging in Bijnor’s business district, breaking store windows and
vandalizing a vehicle that he said belonged to a Hindu man. Police officials
said that at least 288 officers statewide were injured, including 61 from
gunshot wounds.
“We were worried that Hindus and Muslims were
about to fight each other,” Mr. Tyagi said, pointing to the state’s long,
bloody history of such riots.
Many of these towns are now filled with grief.
The family of Mohammed Suleman, a young man fatally shot in a protest on Dec.
20, still can’t believe he is gone.
Sitting in Mr. Suleman’s bedroom, a concrete
shell filled with books, Mr. Suleman’s uncle, Anwar Usmani, broke down as he
spoke about the boy, who he said woke up every day at 5 a.m. to study for the
Indian civil service exam.
“He wanted to serve the country that killed
him,” Mr. Usmani said.
Mr. Suleman’s family said that they had to
beg police officials to give back his body after their vehicle was stopped on
their way back home to the town of Nehtaur from a nearby city, where they had
sought a doctor to try to save him.
Family members who had been in the vehicle
said that Mahaveer Singh Rajawat, a law enforcement official for Nehtaur,
pointed a gun at their chests and told them: “Behave and be silent, or I will
declare that those who died were terrorists!” Mr. Suleman’s body was returned
to them, but they were threatened by the police not to try to rouse public
sympathy by publicly displaying it.
When asked about this during an interview
with The Times, Mr. Rajawat abruptly left his office and drove away in a jeep.
Mr. Tyagi, the superintendent of police, said he was not aware of these accusations.
Surrounded by mourning women, Mr. Suleman’s
mother, Akbari Khatoon, rocked on her bed and wailed.
“The police killed him in cold blood,” she
said, “and that is what the world should know.”
Saumya Khandelwal contributed reporting from
Nagina, and Hari Kumar from New Delhi.
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
