It is highly unfortunate that the NHRC report plays into the communal stereotype that dates back to Partition — of Muslim young men sexually harassing Hindu girls.
All of 19 years old, Raheem’s voice was steady as he spoke about the uprooting, betrayal and loss his family endured during the communal violence which swept the districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli in Uttar Pradesh in 2013.
On September 7 2013, a gale of hate violence hit districts of western Uttar Pradesh, destroying and displacing thousands. Three years later, the large majority of these hate refugees remain exiled permanently from the villages of their birth, painfully rebuilding their lives in small makeshift colonies.
A middle-aged man who repairs shoes on a street corner in Ahmedabad and who has slept for many years on the pavements of the city is one among the hundreds who joined the Azadi Kooch, the protest march from Ahmedabad to Una village in Gir Somnath district against the public lashing of Dalit men for skinning a dead cow.
There is one memory that Tauseef Hussain, now in his twenties, still cherishes of his grandfather Ehsan Jafri. When he visited Jafri in Ahmedabad from the United States with his mother, Jafri’s daughter, during summer vacations, he would have to sit in Jafri’s library in the stifling summer heat.
India in 1984 witnessed two towering calamities. Both were man-made and both were marked by unconscionable state betrayals. A month after the killing of 3,000 Sikhs in the worst single episode of targeted communal violence in Delhi
The dominant narrative surrounding the communal violence which inflamed Muzaffarnagar one year ago is that the stalking of a Jat Hindu girl by a Muslim boy spurred mass anger and retaliatory violence.
Among free India’s gravest failures—along with its inability to end hunger, pervasive poverty and discrimination—is the continued targeting of people with violence and arson only because of their faith or caste.