'In a case of media vigilantism, a reporter from news channel Republic TV was spotted live on March 24 standing by a team of policemen at the DND flyover which connects Delhi to Noida in Uttar Pradesh, heckling a doctor on his way to work for ‘violating the lockdown’. When the senior doctor, Anish Singhal, who is the director and medical superintendent of the Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) Hospital in Noida, showed the reporter his identity card, the reporter termed it ‘fake’. In fact, the channel ran a banner which said, “A man shows fake ID card and tries to venture out”.
'...Scroll.in spoke to the families of many victims of the violence who allege the police have not only been passive, failing to pursue such cases independently, even after they submitted written complaints, the police have ignored them. In one case, the police did not file an FIR after a family reported a young man was missing. His body was later fished out of a drain, but the family claims no FIR has been filed yet.
'...Mirza Muzaffar Ali, who owns and operates locally popular Baba Juice Corner in the area, claimed he hadn’t seen such an atmosphere, laden with apprehensions about “what it could bring” prior to the festival, in six decades... “In my 66 years, I have never seen an atmosphere like this. There is a lot of police deployment in the area, generally because of what happened and also because of Holi...People, especially young boys, are being picked up...
'Usman Saifi had been religiously guarding a Ram temple in Gali Number 18 of Mustafabad’s Nehru Vihar for over a week now. Ever since riots broke out in the Muslim-dominated area of Northeast Delhi, Saifi and his neighbours were conscious of not letting tensions simmer for too long. “He knew that if anything happens to the temple, it will be the Muslims of the area who will be blamed.” his wife Salma told ThePrint. Saifi, 45, was picked up by Delhi Police from outside the temple late Sunday and detained.
'Several senior police personnel are privately feeling saddened at the failure of the Delhi Police to stop the communal violence that took place between 23 and 26 February in northeast Delhi and the beating the force's image has taken as a consequence. The Quint spoke to a few such officers to get the insider’s knowledge of why the police acted the way they did during the violence-hit days... “If the SHO, ACP or DCP did not have enough manpower, why didn’t they ask for extra force? It would have hardly taken any time for additional force to reach the violence-hit area.
'On the afternoon of February 24, as communal violence roiled North East Delhi, three men stepped out of their homes. One wanted to look for his child. The others, his long-time neighbours, decided to accompany him in the search.
'The smile never went off Nishant Kumar’s face. Only his voice quivered with excitement as he spoke, animatedly with hand gestures, about murdering three Muslim men on February 25. It was an act of “retaliation”, he insisted. The previous afternoon – Kumar is certain it was exactly 1 pm – he claimed to have witnessed a “Mohammadan” mob burn down vehicles in the Yamuna Vihar service lane that runs parallel to the Wazirabad-Loni road in North East Delhi. He was at the Bhajanpura petrol pump, fuelling up one of his lorries. He owns two of them...
'Nearly 1,500 to 2,000 outsiders were brought to north-east Delhi and lodged there for nearly 24 hours under a planned conspiracy to unleash violence, Delhi Commission for Minorities chairman Zafarul Islam Khan, alleged on Tuesday, following a visit to the affected areas. He said most of these people stayed in schools before attacking the neighbourhoods. Talking to The Wire about the findings of his team, which visited the areas impacted by violence on March 2, Khan said: “Our revelation is that this was planned violence. For this people had been brought from outside.
'In new video evidence released by BBC, members of the Hindu mob have admitted to the Delhi Police helping them pick stones and throw them towards Muslims. “We did not have enough stones here, so the police brought some and told us to throw them,” Himanshu Rathor said in the video. The video also details incidents of violence perpetrated by the police against the Muslims...'
'Delhi police stopped an ambulance ferrying a man with a bullet injury to hospital four times and asked the accompanying doctor each time to remove the dressing and gaped at the wound, the doctor said on Monday. Harjit Bhatti, a medic among the volunteers assisting the riot victims in northeast Delhi last week, said the incident occurred on February 26 while he was transporting the 30-year-old injured man from the Al Hind nursing home to the Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital, 8km away...'
