[Police in Uttar
Pradesh state have embarked on ‘reign of terror’ against Muslims in wake of new
citizenship law]
By Hannah Ellis-Petersen
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Mohammad
Sharif, 74, and his wife, in front of their hut in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh.
The
couple’s son, Mohammad Raees, was shot dead by police.
Photograph:
Shaikh Azizur Rahman/The Guardian
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It was midnight at a police barracks in the
Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and in a freezing windowless room about 150
Muslim men and boys sat huddled, bloodied and bruised. Some of the shivering
prisoners had raw gashes across their hands and faces, others had broken limbs
splayed out at awkward angles. The beatings from police came frequently,
according to multiple corresponding accounts; to those who asked for water or
closed their eyes in drowsiness or simply did nothing at all. Over and over,
metal rods and bamboo canes hit soft human skin. Some had been stripped of
their clothes. The youngest among them was just 12 years old, said witnesses.
How hundreds of innocent Muslim residents of
the city of Muzaffarnagar came to be rounded up on 20 December, before being
tortured in police detention, is part of what Indian activist and academic
Yogendra Yadav described as an unprecedented and ruthless “reign of terror”
imposed upon the country’s most populous state over the past two weeks.
Since last month, India has been engulfed in
the biggest nationwide protests in over four decades. People of all religions,
classes, castes and ages took to the streets in opposition to a new citizenship
amendment act (CAA) passed by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Hindu
nationalist BJP government, which many say discriminates against Muslims and
undermines India’s secular foundations. The government has dealt with the
dissent with increasing repression, with authorities banning gatherings of more
than four people and demonstrators met with batons and tear gas.
Nowhere has the crackdown been so brutal and
so openly communal against the Muslim communitythan in Uttar Pradesh. According
to accounts given to the Guardian by dozens of victims, witnesses and
activists, police in the state stand accused of a string of allegations: firing
indiscriminately into crowds; beating Muslim bystanders in the streets; raiding
and looting Muslim homes while shouting Islamophobic slurs and Hindu
nationalist slogans; detaining and torturing Muslim children. The allegations
further include forcing signed confessions and filing bogus criminal charges
against thousands of Muslims who had never been to a protest.
Hundreds of Muslims and activists remain
behind bars across Uttar Pradesh and thousands have been placed on police
lists. And the orders, it appears, come from the very top.
BJP state chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, a
militant Hindu nationalist notorious for his open hatred and persecution of
Muslims, pledged to take revenge on protesters in the wake of the unrest. The
police took him at his word. “It was kristallnacht for Muslims,” said activist
Kavita Krishnan, describing the events that unfolded across the state on Friday
20 and Saturday 21 December.
That day in Muzaffarnagar, trouble began when
a peaceful demonstration against the citizenship act turned violent as police
clashed with protesters. Stones were pelted and vehicles were set alight. In
response, police opened fire on the crowds. Nearby, maulana Asad Raza Hussaini,
a respected Muslim cleric, and his students at Sadaat Madrasa, an Islamic
seminary, were resting after afternoon prayers when about 50 police officers,
bearing batons and iron rods, broke down the doors and burst in. They were
allegedly looking for people who had taken part in the protest but upon
entering the madrasa began violently smashing everything in their pathway.
“The maulana told the policemen gently that
none from the seminary took part in any protest rally and pleaded for them not
to vandalise the Qur’an centre in the madrasa,” said a neighbour who witnessed
the police attack but did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal. “It
was then that the policemen and Rapid Action Force personnel [a branch of the
police that deals with crowd control] pounced on him.”
The police then rounded up Hussaini and 35 of
his students, 15 of whom were under 18 and mostly orphans, and took them to a
nearby police barracks. Here the cleric was, witnesses allege, stripped of his
clothes, beaten and a rod shoved up his anus, causing rectal bleeding, while
the students were allegedly tortured with bamboo rods and made to shout Hindu
nationalist slogans Jai Shri Ram” [Hail Lord Ram] and “Har Har Mahadev” [Save
us Lord Shiva].
“The maulana had been beaten up very badly
and was left without a single cloth on his body and when he was released we
found him in very bad shape,” said Salman Saeed, a local Congress leader who
came to pick up Hussaini and several students from Civil Lines Barracks. “He
was badly wounded and bloodied, with many bruises across his body. He could not
stand up on his legs and was bare-bodied. We were shocked to see the maulana in
that condition. He is bed-ridden now.”
While Hussaini and all his underage students
were released at 2am that night, 12 adults students and the madrasa cook remain
behind bars and have been charged with taking part in violence, despite never
partaking in a protest.
The young students were not the only underage
Muslim prisoners in Muzaffarnagar police barracks that night. Upon seeing the
commotion in the streets, 14-year-old Mohammad Sadiq, who worked as a mason’s
assistant, set out to find his 11-year-old brother. Cars and motorcycles had
been set alight and as protesters were fleeing around him, he too began to run.
It was then that a dozen police pounced on him, hitting his legs with batons to
make him fall to the ground and then unleashing a torrent of blows, he said.
“The police said to me, ‘if you tell us the
names of 100 Muslims involved in the riots we will stop beating you’,” recounted
Sadiq, as he lay bed-bound and weak from his injuries in his one-room family
shack. “I kept telling them I had nothing to do with the riots, that I did not
know anything but they kept beating me. The policemen told me to shout ‘Jai Sri
Ram’ and I told them I would not so they put an iron rod into the flames of the
car that was on fire and then held it against my hands to burn me.”
“Then some of the police officers tried to
pick me up and put me in the flames of the car on fire,” Sadiq said, “but two
of them said ‘no, let’s just take him to the police station’.”
Sadiq was kept in police detention for the
next four days. Stripped to his underwear, he said he was tortured. For two
days he was given no food or water and no medical treatment for his badly bleeding
wounds. When he was finally released his condition was so bad his mother,
Rehana Begum, fainted when she came to collect him.
“His father is dead so he was the only
earning member of this house but he has been beaten so badly across the knees
he can not walk and can not work now so what will happen to us?” she said, her
head in her hands.
According to multiple accounts, in the
late-night raids on Muslim homes carried out in Muzaffarnagar and across the
state over those two days, women, children and the elderly were not spared the
brunt of the police brutality.
One such victim was 73-year-old Hamid Hasan,
who was viciously beaten when police stormed into his house late on 20
December, using metal batons to attack him, his 65-year-old wife and his
22-year-old granddaughter, Ruqaiya Parveen, who was hit so hard across the head
she collapsed from the wound and had to have 16 stitches.
Hasan wiped away tears as he showed the
wrecked remnants of the wedding gifts purchased for his granddaughter’s
forthcoming marriage, including a destroyed television, ripped sofa, overturned
fridge and smashed air-conditioning unit he had saved up his whole life to buy.
“My family did not take part in any protests, why would they do this to us,”
wailed Hasan, who could barely walk from his injuries. “Muslims in this country
are being made to live in fear, even in our homes we are not safe from violence
now.”
Hasan’s 14-year-old grandson Mohammad Ahmad
was also dragged from his bed by the officers, beaten in the street and then
detained and allegedly tortured by police in the police barracks, along with
Hasan’s son Mohammad Sajid, 40. Ahmad recounted how he witnessed officers force
his uncle Sajid to sign a confession that a gun and bullets had been found in
the police raid on their home. “He did not want to sign it but he had to
because we were terrified,” whispered Ahmad softly, his legs still wrapped in
bandages from the beatings.
After 24 hours Ahmad was released back to his
family, but Sajid remains behind bars, his medical condition worsening by the
day.
Official figures put the protest death toll
in the state at 17. All were Muslim and the youngest was eight. Activists
allege a deliberate obfuscation by the police around these deaths, with none of
the families given postmortem reports.
The sole fatality in Muzaffarnagar on 20
December was Noor Mohammad, 26, a day-wage labourer who was shot over half a
kilometre away from where the protests took place. Police allege he was killed
by protesters. His wife, 23-year-old Sanno Begum, who is seven months pregnant
with their second child, wept as she said all she wanted was “justice for my
husband and my daughter”.
“If they are not giving us the postmortem
report, then it must be the police who shot him. I want justice from the
government. I have got a little daughter. I have no one to support us now,” she
said through tears.
Not only did the police force the family to
bury Noor 60km (40 miles) away from Muzaffarnagar, but they accompanied the
body to the ground, prevented proper funeral rites being carried out and then
confiscated the burial certificate from the family. “It is clear they want to
destroy all evidence about his death,” said his brother-in-law Mohammad Salim.
The Muzaffarnagar police did not make
themselves available for comment.
Over 500km across the state in the city of
Kanpur, Mohammad Sharif, 74, sobbed as he described how his son Mohammad Raees,
30, died on 20 December in the crossfire of a protest. Raees had been working
that day, washing utensils for a wedding, when he wandered out to see the
commotion in the street and was hit by a police bullet. “He was not a
protester, he was killed because he was Muslim,” said Sharif. “I want to die.
Why I am alive when he is not? How can we go on living now?”
Almost two weeks have passed since the night
of the raids but the climate of fear has not eased, with many abandoning their
homes altogether. After the Guardian met with two activists in Kanpur this
week, they were called into the police station and threatened with being
charged with sedition if they spoke to the media again. They subsequently
requested their identities be kept anonymous.
The Uttar Pradesh government insist its
actions were justified. “Every rioter is thinking they made a big mistake by
challenging Yogi ji’s government after seeing strict actions taken by it
against rioters,” said the chief minister’s office in a recent series of
twitter posts. “Every rioter is shocked. Every demonstrator is stunned.
Everyone has been silenced.”
Shaikh Azizur Rahman contributed to this
report
