'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.
'Seven Congress MPs have been suspended from the rest of the budget session for the ruckus created in parliament for the last three days over a discussion on last week's violence in Delhi. The Speaker has also accepted the government's call to form a committee and examine their conduct for possible disqualification, sources said... Calling it "revenge politics", Congress's leader of the house Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said the party will "not let up". "This is a government decision, not decision by Speaker. What kind of dictatorship is this?" said Mr Chowdhury.
'The Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday arrested two persons for thrashing two youths and spreading a 'false' story of cow slaughter in Bulandhshar. The arrests followed the wide circulation of a video showing the two youths being hit with sticks by a group of at least six persons in Sikandrabad area on March 2. The two had claimed that while assaulting them, the assaulters accused them of cow slaughter and hurled communal abuses at them while referring to the Delhi violence...'
'Justice S Muralidhar, whose transfer to the Punjab and Haryana High Court triggered criticism of the government last month, was on Thursday given a grand farewell by the Delhi High Court Bar Association. The judge was described as the “Kohinoor” of the Delhi High Court, reported Bar and Bench. He had been at the Delhi High Court since 2006. On February 12, the Supreme Court collegium had recommended the transfer of Muralidhar to the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Muralidhar was the third senior most judge in the Delhi High Court.
'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.
'...Mr Munazir's house was looted and torched by a mob of masked and helmeted young men, who swept into the mixed neighbourhood. They were armed with staves, hockey sticks, stones and bottles filled with petrol, and were chanting "Jai Shri Ram", or "Victory to Lord Ram", a greeting which has been turned into a murder cry by Hindu lynch mobs in recent years.
'BJP leader Kapil Mishra, whose incendiary speech is being blamed for instigating the Delhi riots in which at least 48 Indians have been killed, has nine guards protecting him round the clock on the orders of the Union home ministry that reports to Amit Shah. Sources said the Y-category security cover for Mishra, a former AAP MLA who was suspended by the party in 2017 and joined the BJP ahead of last month’s Delhi Assembly elections, is not new and was sanctioned in 2017...'
'"After attacking us, the mob returned to check if we were alive or not. I did not move. They hit me with a stick on my head and then moved towards my father. They thought I was dead but they kept hitting my father on his head, they probably thought he still had chances of surviving," 25-year-old Nitin Kumar, a resident of Brahampuri, recalls the deadly violence in Gali No 1, on the night of 24 February. With forty stitches on his forehead and blood in his left eye, he narrates to The Quint how his father, 51-year-old Vinod Kumar, was beaten up before him.
'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...'
