NEW DELHI, March 12: Imran Khan, a 30-year-old labourer, was walking home on February 24 after a hard day’s work when a mob in northeast Delhi intercepted him.
“They first asked my name to find out if I was a Hindu or a Muslim,” he told. As soon as he said his name, which is common among south Asian Muslims, he says they started hitting him with sticks and iron rods.
“I tried to reason with them but they didn’t listen. They laughed while some of them ate the fruits I was carrying home for children.”
Khan was beaten so badly he lost consciousness. When he came to, he found himself in a drainage ditch, half submerged in filthy water, with a rope tied around his neck.
“Perhaps they thought I was dead and threw me in the drain,” he told at a relief camp in Delhi’s Mustafabad area where he has taken shelter. His skull was still bandaged, but he showed photos of the wounds that required 32 stitches on his skull. “Only God saved me.”
Deadly clashes displace thousands: Khan is among thousands of people living in makeshift relief camps set up for those who fled last month’s anti-Muslim riots in India’s capital. The violence left at least 53 people dead and more than 200 injured.
It started on February 24, the eve of President Donald Trump’s visit to India, when supporters of a controversial new citizenship law, seen by many as discriminatory against the country’s minority Muslim population, clashed with people protesting against it.
The clashes erupted after at least one Hindu politician warned India’s police in a public address that if they didn’t break up the protests against the new law, he and others would do it for them.
Mobs of people armed with iron rods, sticks, Molotov cocktails and homemade guns ransacked several neighborhoods, killing people, setting houses, shops and cars on fire.
Two weeks later, more than 5,000 Muslims find themselves living in at least three makeshift camps. The clusters of tents are overcrowded and lacking some basic amenities for sanitation and hygiene – a dangerous situation amid a global coronavirus outbreak. COVID-19 cases have been reported in the city of almost 19 million. DNA
