He lay in a bloodied ball on the floor, but the baton blows kept on coming.
As the 30 strangers beat him without stopping, Mohammad Zubair closed his eyes, brought his forehead to the ground and prayed.
“The blows kept raining on my head, hands and back,” Zubair, 37, said. “I did not ask them to stop beating me. I became silent, tried to hold my breath and stiffen my body.”
Illustration: Mountain People
As he spoke, tears rolled down his face.
“First I asked: ‘Why are you attacking me? What wrong have I done?’ But they did not listen to my words and went on hitting me from all sides, “ he said. “They were shouting: maro shaale mulleko [kill the bastard Muslim] and jai Sri Ram [a Hindu nationalist slogan]. There were many other men who stood by who did not come to save me.”
The photograph of Zubair being ruthlessly beaten in broad daylight in the streets by a mob of young Hindu men was one of the most shocking images of the brutal religious riots that engulfed Delhi last week, where Hindus were pitted against Muslims, thousands were injured and 43 people killed.
The violence raged across the northeast of India’s capital territory for four days as mosques were set alight, Muslims were burned alive in their homes, or dragged out into the streets and lynched.
Muslim businesses and property were also set alight.
In streets where Hindus and Muslims had lived peacefully side by side, bodies lay bloodied alongside discarded and burned-out vehicles and bikes, shattered glass and smoldering shopfronts.
The police have been accused of enabling, encouraging or even joining in with Hindu mobs.
Hindu mobs were stopping men in the streets demanding to see their ID cards. If anyone refused, they were forced to show whether or not they were circumcised, as is common among Muslim men.
Imran Khan, 30, a street hawker who lives in Shiv Vihar, northwest Delhi, was walking home evening when a group descended on him.
“Some of them forced me to pull down my trousers,” Khan said. “They started beating me violently as soon as they became sure that I was Muslim.”
Armed with iron rods, crowbars and metal pipes, the Hindu mob beat Khan unconscious.
When he came to hours later, he found that the attackers, assuming he was dead, had tied a rope around his neck and dragged him into a gutter.
There has been brutality on both sides, but it was the Muslim community of Delhi who were overwhelmingly targeted by Hindu mobs in their tens of thousands.
In Chand Bagh, one of the worst-hit areas, only the Muslim businesses — hairdressers, ice-cream shops, butchers — lay in ruins.
On one corner, the charred husks of hundreds of oranges, bananas and watermelons spilled out of the front of a Muslim fruit stall, filling the air with the putrid smell of burned fruit.
Among the 43 dead was Musharraf, a 30-year-old Muslim man.
He was at home with his wife and children in the Bhagirathi Vihar area of Gokalpuri, northeast Delhi, when a mob of about 30 men with iron rods, knives and chains — many wearing motorcycle helmets so they could not be identified — broke down the locked door shouting jai Sri Ram.
“They cut the electricity, so it was all dark, and started smashing the house,” said Shakir, his brother-in-law. “His wife was calling the police, but they did not come. Everyone got into the beds to hide, but the men covered everything with kerosene and shouted: ‘Will you come out or do you want us to burn you alive?’”
“They smashed the bed where Musharraf was hiding underneath and he screamed, so they grabbed him and dragged him out into the street. The children ran out, too, and were screaming,” Shakir said. “His daughter, Kushi — she is just 11 — fell on the feet of those men, pleading: ‘Don’t kill my father.’ She tried to save him, but they beat him to death in the middle of the street and threw him in the gutter.”
Like so many other Muslims in Delhi, Shakir and his family said that after the riots they could no longer stay in the city they had called home for decades and were moving back to their ancestral village.
“We have never felt threatened and always lived peacefully with our Hindu brothers, but I don’t feel safe anywhere in Delhi now,” he said.
Violence has been a stain on India’s history since partition in 1947, when Pakistan was formed as a separate Muslim state, and up to 2 million people died in the fighting and its aftermath.
Riots have continued to erupt along religious lines in a nation where about 14 percent of the population are Muslim, with an 80 percent Hindu majority.
The fracturing of relations began in the 1960s and 1970s, but a flashpoint took place in 1992, when a right-wing Hindu mob of thousands, which included several members of the now-ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), tore down the Babri mosque in Ayodhya.
When the BJP was elected to government in 2014, led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, divisions widened.
The BJP is the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a militant Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization that has been accused repeatedly of orchestrating attacks on Muslims.
The BJP, which believes that India should be a Hindu, not a secular, nation, has fostered an environment of hate in India. Lynchings of Muslims began and Muslims have been gradually relegated to second-class citizens in their own nation.
Even before he became prime minister, Modi’s reputation had been tainted by hatred and violence.
As Gujarat chief minister, he had been accused of encouraging sectarian riots in 2002 that left more than 1,000 people dead, 800 of them Muslims.
Modi denies the charges, which resulted in him being banned from the US.
He was cleared by the Indian Supreme Court in 2012, but has never apologized nor expressed remorse for the killings.
His landslide re-election victory in May last year prompted an escalation of the Hindu nationalist agenda, but it was the passing of a Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December last year that proved the tipping point.
The law, which grants Indian citizenship to refugees of every major South Asian religion except Islam, was widely condemned as discriminatory. Many saw it as an attempt to enshrine the Hindu nationalist agenda into law and undermine the nation’s secular foundations.
The controversy has triggered India’s longest period of unrest in 40 years, with millions of people of all religions taking to the streets in protest, but the BJP response has been to ramp up its rhetoric, particularly in last month’s Delhi state assembly elections.
“The BJP began fermenting this crisis in Delhi weeks ago, as a way to win Hindu votes in the election,” political commentator Ashis Nandy said.
The spark for the latest violence was provided by Kapil Mishra, a BJP leader who had just lost his seat in those elections, when he incited a Hindu mob to violently remove a group of Muslims who were blocking a road in northwest Delhi in protest against the CAA.
Addressing the peaceful protest, Mishra issued an inflammatory ultimatum.
“If the roads are not cleared ... we will be forced to hit the streets,” he said.
Stone pelting began between Muslims and Hindus, which quickly descended into the violence that spread throughout the capital territory.
However, the riots were not simply neighbors turning against neighbors.
On Feb. 23, rumors spread across right-wing Hindu social media that dozens of mosques in Delhi had announced on loudspeakers that the police had arrested 32 imams. It prompted many outside Delhi to comment that they would come out to “teach our Muslim brothers a lesson.”
Soon after, residents in Mustafabad, an area right on the edge of northwest Delhi badly affected by the riots, reported seeing Hindu youths armed with machetes, metal rods and wooden sticks coming in trucks from the neighboring states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.
“We all saw truckloads of these mobs coming over the border from Uttar Pradesh, it was outsiders who came in and incited the violence,” Shoaib Alam, 32, said. “And that then stirred up local people.”
Uttar Pradesh, whose BJP chief minister is the firebrand Hindu nationalist and openly Islamaphobic Yogi Adityanath, is a notorious hotbed of criminal activity and lawlessness. It has also been the state accused of carrying out some of the worst state-sponsored attacks, detention and torture of Muslims in a crackdown against the CAA protests.
“I have not the slightest doubt that this was not a chance, spontaneous riot,” said Harsh Mander, an author and activist who is director of the Centre for Equity Studies, a Delhi research organization. “It was certainly orchestrated and built up as part of the politics of the ruling party. I think the BJP were unnerved by the scale of the protest against the citizenship amendment law and, more specifically, that it was Hindus and Muslims coming out together in the resistance.”
“It was only a matter of time before they would try and convert it into a Hindu-Muslim violent riot and encourage the most primal kind of hatred that wins them support, and after their defeat in the Delhi election, it seems this was an outlet for all the hatred they built up,” Mander said.
BJP spokesman Raveesh Kumar denied that the government had inflamed religious tensions or had any role in the riots.
“These are factually inaccurate and misleading, and appear to be aimed at politicizing the issue,” Kumar said.
At al-Hind hospital, a cramped and basic medical facility in Mustafabad which was on the front line of the violence, Meeraj Ekram looked shell-shocked as he spoke of the more than 500 victims that had come through its doors since the riots began.
Mainly they had gunshot wounds, but there were also stabbings, acid burns and mutilated genitalia.
Police were not allowing ambulances into Mustafabad to rescue the wounded and hundreds of patients lay on the floor.
“The injuries we were seeing were horrifying — I have never seen such terrible things in my whole life,” Ekram said.
Muskan, a 20-year-old Muslim who was eight months pregnant, lay in a critical condition in a hospital bed after she was set upon by a Hindu mob.
“They threw me to the ground, kicked my stomach and my whole body,” she whispered. “I pleaded with them not to harm my baby, I said: ‘Please, please’ over and over, but they kept kicking.”
Also among the patients taken to al-Hind last week were local two imams.
With a grimace, Ekram showed photographs of the imam of Shiv Vihar mosque, whose face had been badly disfigured. When men had entered the mosque, the imam had attempted to run away, but had been caught by the mobs, who threw a bucket of acid into his face.
Mufti Mohammad Tahir, the imam of Farooqia mosque near Mustafabad, suffered a similar fate.
He spoke of how he had locked himself in an upper room of the mosque when the riots broke out, but police broke down the door, dragged him out and handed him to the waiting Hindu mobs outside, who beat him unconscious, smashing his limbs.
The mosque was torched — shelves of dozens of blackened Korans lined one wall and a bowl containing burned fragments of Islamic religious scripture sat on a table.
Many who witnessed the riots claim that police stood by as Muslims were attacked or helped the Hindu mobs. Most of those who called the police for help did so in vain.
While the Delhi government is controlled by the progressive Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the police are under the control of Indian Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, a former president of the BJP.
The police have said the focus of their investigation into the riots is on local Muslim leaders, while no BJP leaders have been charged.
Delhi police were not available for comment.
Even Indian Legislator Haji Yunus of the AAP, who represents Mustafabad, described how the police ignored his requests for help.
“I made several calls to the police station and they did nothing to help,” Yunus said. “My entire government felt helpless, there was no way for us get the situation under control. There was no effort from police at all for at least two days. The police were not even allowing the ambulances through to carry out the injured people.”
Yunus said that the hatred stirred up by the BJP in the Delhi elections should be investigated.
“The BJP did not think they could be defeated so badly in the election, and so after they lost they let out their frustration this way,” he said.
Yet the prospect of holding Delhi police to account for their role in the riots through the legal system looks increasingly unlikely.
Indian Justice S. Muralidhar, a judge at the Delhi High Court, openly condemned the actions of the police and government on Wednesday last week at a hearing into the riots, but by Thursday morning, the hearing had been transferred to another court and the case was taken from him.
The new judge gave the government four weeks to respond to the charges.
However, for all the tales of discord, dozens of accounts were also given of how Sikh and Hindu families helped save their Muslim neighbors, sheltering them in their homes as the violence broke out or helping them escape as the mobs descended.
One Hindu man, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, spoke of how he secretly escorted seven Muslim families to safety in Shiv Vihar.
“I formed a small group involving a few other elderly Hindu neighbors and we managed to thwart the planned attacks on those Muslim households,” he said.
Meanwhile, in the Hindu-majority neighborhood of Gokalpuri, a Sikh father, Mohinder Singh, 53, and his son, Inderjit, used their motorcycles to rescue about 70 Muslim men and children, the youngest just nine years old.
They had been trapped in the mosque and madrasah, as a mob roamed the streets outside.
Singh took the children two at a time on his bike, putting turbans on their heads as a disguise.
“I did not see if they were Muslim or Hindu, I did this for humanity,” he said. “I had to save them.”
Majinder Singh Sirsa, a leading Sikh politician in Delhi, said the community had opened up its gurdwaras for shelter, but had been attacked by hardline Hindu and Muslim groups for doing so.
“We do feel the pain because we were also targeted 35 years ago,” he said, referring to anti-Sikh pogroms in Delhi in 1984 when more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed. “Back then, Delhi was burning and humanity died. This week, it has happened once again.”
Additional reporting by Shaikh Azizur Rahman
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