Haldwani, India – At about 6:45pm on February 8, Mohammad Arif called his
brother Zahid. A mosque and an Islamic school had been razed by government
officials in their town of Haldwani in northern India, and violence had broken
out. The 52-year-old Arif wanted his brother, seven years younger, to return
home immediately from the iron and cement shop he worked in.
Zahid rushed home on his motorbike
and parked it outside the house. Unaware that the protest had become violent,
Zahid hurried to buy milk for his infant grandchild.
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When Zahid’s 16-year-old middle son
Mohammad Anas learned that his father had gone out again, he went looking for
him in the cramped, dingy lanes of Haldwani’s Banbhoolpura area, a Muslim
ghetto. The police shot the son in the stomach in the lane, and the father in
the chest 200 metres along the same road.
Zahid and Anas are among at least
six people killed, including five Muslims, in clashes that involved mob
violence and police firing. At least two dozen civilians and more than 100
police personnel were injured, several police vehicles were burned and a police
station was attacked in the fallout from protests in Haldwani, the latest site
of government-led demolitions in India targeting Muslim structures.
The town’s municipal authorities
bulldozed the buildings called the Mariyam mosque, which could accommodate
500-600 worshippers, and the Abdul Razzaq Zakariya school in Malik ka Bagicha
in Banbhoolpura on February 8, saying that they had been built without
permission.
Residents said the mosque and the
school – built in 2002 – have been unfairly targeted, despite a court hearing
on the matter scheduled on February 14. The Quran, other religious books and
prayer mats are still buried under the rubble.
Zahid,
45 (left), and his 16-year-old son Anas (right). On February 8, the police
allegedly shot and killed the two following protests over the demolition of a
mosque and religious school in India’s Haldwani town [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
‘Demolition politically
motivated’
When municipal authorities,
accompanied by the police and bulldozers, came to demolish the mosque and
school, only 25-30 women were inside the compound, said 20-year-old Samreen
Khanum, from behind her burqa.
They, and other residents who
arrived soon afterwards, tried pressing authorities to not demolish the
structures, “The Masjid is our Allah’s home. We can’t see it getting Shaheed
(martyred),” said Samreen.
But the demolition started at about
4:30pm. According to the police, residents threw stones at them and set
vehicles on fire. The police then hurled tear gas shells and baton-charged the
protesters to control the violence.
However, the residents say that police lathi-charged (hit with
sticks) the protesting women and tear gassed them, angering the protesters and
making some resort to arson. Protesters also surrounded the police station.
Samreen said she was fasting and fainted during the teargassing. Her sister,
Najma Khanum, 21, was also injured in the police melee.
Both sisters feel that the demolition was politically motivated.
“Why is it that only our mosques are demolished every time? If they want to
remove encroachment they should remove illegal structures like temples and not
just a single mosque and madrasa [school] in a Muslim ghetto,” said Najma.
Last month, Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hindu
temple in the northern city of Ayodhya, built on the site of a
centuries-old Mughal-era mosque that was destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.
In 2023, the government of the
state of Uttarakhand, where Haldwani is based, said it
had demolished more than 300 Muslim shrines within 90 days.
Even the minority cell of the
Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules Uttarakhand, where Haldwani is based, and
nationally in New Delhi, had protested against plans for the latest demolitions.
“The madrasa is used by poor
children and the old offer prayers at the mosque … we are trying very hard to
make the minority community get along with our party … Keeping in mind the
coming elections and the interest of the party, those structures should not be
demolished,” the BJP minority cell, which leads its outreach to Muslims, wrote
in a February 3 letter to Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami.
Samreen and Najma are now worried
about their 18-year-old brother Mohammad Ayan, who went out to sell vegetables
on his cart on February 8 when the violence broke out. Four days later, they
have still not found him.
The
half-demolished Mariyam mosque in Malik ka Bagicha, Haldwanim, India, on
February 9, 2024, the day after the structure was razed by municipal
authorities [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
Shoot-on-sight orders,
curfew and internet shutdown
“We only know that six people have
been killed. We don’t know if it’s our brother or friend. They aren’t letting
us near the bodies or allowing us to identify them. Many of the bodies are left
unclaimed. They have cut the internet and we can’t even check the names of the
killed,” Samreen said.
When Zahid’s eldest son,
22-year-old Mohammad Aman, learned that his father and younger brother had been
shot, he and a friend went out to retrieve their bodies. “Even after shooting
my brother, policemen beat him with a baton. He attempted to shield his
father’s body by lying on it but they beat him with the butt of a rifle,” Aman
said.
Zahid had already died when Arif,
who lives 500 metres away, arrived at his home, but his nephew was drenched in
blood but still breathing. He claims police barred them from taking Anas to
hospital. “If they had allowed us to take him to the hospital, my nephew would
be alive,” he said, tearing up. The family attempted to stem the flow of blood
with cloth and cotton borrowed from neighbours.
While the police claim that their
response was driven by violent attacks on them by protesters, the families of
many of those killed insist their relatives were not even involved in the
protests.
“My father went to buy milk and my
brother went to look for him,” said Aman, Zahid’s son who tried to rescue his
father and brother. “So why were they killed?”
Following the incident, authorities
in Haldwani issued shoot-on-sight orders, imposed a curfew, suspended internet
services, closed schools, and banned large gatherings – even for Jummah prayers
in congregation.
The next morning, February 9, at
about 9am, an ambulance arrived at Zahid’s house to transport the bodies of
Zahid and Anas to the Dr Susheela Tiwari Government Hospital, where they were
declared dead and taken to the mortuary, where a postmortem was performed on
the bodies.
By 10pm, they had been buried in
the presence of five family members as well as police officers. During the
burial, Arif said that when they went to bury his brother and nephew, they
discovered the bodies of another three people killed during the violence that
had been buried in unmarked graves. “They (police) did not allow us to film the
funeral with our phones. We were only allowed to use the torch lights on our
phones,” he claimed.
Guddu Altaf, 47, who runs a
carpentry shop near the city’s cemetery, said families of those killed in the
violence contacted him to make wooden planks for the graves. “I made planks for
six graves … five for people who were shot and one who died of a heart attack
during the violence,” he said.
Mosque
demolition sparks deadly protests in India | Al Jazeera Newsfeed
|
Mob allegedly burns Muslim homes
Some 700 metres away from Zahid’s
home, Faeem Qureshi, 30, a goods vehicle driver and father of two children – a
daughter aged seven and a son, six – was killed outside his home by some of his
own neighbours in Gandhinagar.
The locality is dominated by
members of the Valmiki caste, which is near the bottom of Hinduism’s complex
caste hierarchy. The Gandhinagar neighbourhood had only eight Muslim homes.
On February 8, a 200-strong Valmiki
mob torched Qureshi’s house, mini truck, scooter and bike, sending plumes of
black smoke into the sky. Qureshi suffered three bullet wounds and was declared
dead on arrival at the hospital, said Javed, his brother.
According to Javed, Qureshi pleaded
with the Valmiki mob not to burn his vehicles parked in front of the residence.
But the attackers threw petrol bombs and when Qureshi hurried downstairs to
douse the flames with a bucket of water, he was shot dead.
The district magistrate of
Nainital, Vandana Singh, told reporters that the Haldwani violence incident was
not communal. “I request everybody to not make it communal or sensitive,” she
said. Haldwani falls under the Nainital district.
However, the victims’ families say
the attackers were shouting aggressive slogans linked to Hindu majoritarianism,
and hurling abuse against Muslims. Javed alleged that the police stood about 50
metres away from the Valmiki mob and took no action.
Al Jazeera spoke with Mohammad
Furqan, 41, the uncle of Mohammad Shaban, 23, a shopkeeper from Machli Bazaar
who was allegedly killed in police fire.
“After the demolition, when the
riot happened, Shaban closed his shop and while coming home he was shot,” Furqan
said. He was declared dead in hospital.
Furqan also said about three dozen
policemen were now stationed outside Shaban’s home. “Even we are not permitted
inside the house. Police keep harassing us,” he claimed.
Nazir Hussain, 42, owns a tailoring
business in Haldwani. On the evening of February 8, the same Valmiki mob that
attacked Qureshi also set fire to his home, which is two houses from Qureshi’s.
The homes of three of Hussain’s relatives were also torched and looted.
“My family barely survived by
climbing onto our neighbour’s terrace. I used to treat my neighbours [Valmiki]
like family, but they betrayed us and tried to kill us,” Hussain said, adding
that he had suffered a loss of up to 800,000 Indian rupees, or $9,600.
Yunus
Raza, 33, was shot in the right leg allegedly by police while out buying milk
for his six-month-old child [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]
Fear of arrest,
demolition
Yunus Raza, 33, lay on a bed in the
eastern end of Indira Nagar, a neighbourhood near the railway tracks, in a dark
one-bedroom house with unplastered walls and a tin sheet roof. The right leg of
his trousers was torn up to the knee and covered in blood. There was an unclean
bloodied bandage on his right leg where a bullet had struck him. His
six-month-old infant slept nearby on his side.
Raza had gone out to buy milk for
his baby on the evening of February 8. But at the dairy shop, he got caught up
in a stampede that he said began when police started baton-charging people. He
was shot in the right leg. “The police shot me, and I fell unconscious. People
picked me up and took me home,” he said.
“I am poor. I cannot afford to go
to a private hospital and there are policemen at the government hospital,” he
said.
Though Raza insists he was not a
part of the protests against the police, law enforcement agencies in India have
a long history of disproportionately arresting Muslim men after any clashes –
including people unrelated to the actual violence. At least 30 people have been
taken into custody so far since the clashes, and witnesses say all arrests so
far have been made in Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods.
“If I go out, they will arrest me
and throw me in jail,” Raza said.
His family faces an uncertain
future as their sole earner is bedridden for the next few months. “How will I
feed my children?” asked Raza, a construction labourer in Haldwani.
Dhami, Uttarakhand’s chief
minister, said the government would take the “strictest action against rioters
and miscreants”.
“Police have been given clear
instructions to deal strictly with unruly elements,” he said in a statement. “Every
rioter who indulged in arson and stone pelting is being identified. No
miscreant who disturbs harmony and peace will be spared.”
But while Muslims have been the
principal victims of the Haldwani violence, the community fears that they might
be the targets of action by Dhami’s government too.
The atmosphere of distrust between
Haldwani’s authorities and the town’s Muslims has a history.
In January last year, widespread
protests erupted in the town after authorities ordered the demolition of nearly
4,000 Muslim homes that had allegedly encroached on land owned
by the state-run railways. The drive was stayed by the Supreme Court, which
said 50,000 people “cannot be uprooted overnight”.
Guddu Ansari, 36, a blacksmith and
resident of Malik ka Bagicha, a smaller neighbourhood where the mosque and
madrasa were located, fears that now the government might send bulldozers to
demolish their homes as well.
Dhami announced on Monday that his
government plans to construct a police station on the land where the school and
mosque stood.
Rights groups have in the past
accused the BJP of using bulldozers to illegally demolish the homes and
businesses of people accused of violence.
In two
reports published together this week, the human rights group
Amnesty International documented the “punitive” demolition of at least 128
Muslim properties from April to June 2022, rendering at least 617 people either
homeless or without livelihoods.
According to the police, 30 people have been arrested so far and
three FIRs (police complaints) have been lodged against 5,000 unidentified
people.
“Nobody wants to talk; everyone is
terrified,” said Javed Siddique, a prominent local politician who was arrested
by authorities just hours after speaking with Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera contacted Nainital’s
Senior Superintendent of Police, Prahlad Narayan Meena about the allegations
levelled against police but received no response. Al Jazeera also sought
comment from the district magistrate of Nainital, Singh, but is yet to receive
any.
Back at home, Arif said he was
unwilling to file a complaint over the killings of his brother and nephew. “Who
do we file the complaint against? The police? My brother and nephew were both
killed by police bullets. There is no justice here. They are treating us
unjustly because we are Muslim,” he said.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
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