The violence-hit areas in North East Delhi, where all that remains after the act of hate are wounded bodies and thinker.
Cleansing of secularism
February 26, 2020, 10:30 a.m. Outside the Maujpur Metro station near Kabir Nagar, there is not a soul on the road. No vehicular traffic, no pedestrian, just a long row of policemen with stern faces holding guns and batons. By the side of the roads are the burnt remains of a motorcycle and a car and a thousand pieces of wood, cardboard tyres, iron railings and concrete lattice screen, some of them still smouldering. They have probably been dumped aside to allow free movement of traffic, of which there is none. Fear hangs thick in the air. I am on my way to Gokulpuri, a little more than a kilometre away, but the smell of smoke visible in the sky from Kabir Nagar portend disaster. As one black smell rises and fades into the sky, another makes its appearance. It goes on and on endlessly. Row of tyre shops have been set afire in Gokulpuri, as I discover half an hour later.
It reminds 78 year old Haji Yaqub of the 1984 massacre of Sikhs following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. At that time, he had shifted with his family from Gokulpuri just hours before violence struck the colony. “Hundreds of Sikhs were butchered in this part of the city in 1984. The media did not even get to know of it for days. The business of Sikhs were set on fire. I saw similar hatred in the eyes of men here and decided to move my children against their wishes to Mustafabad,” he says. It was scarily farsightedness. Not many Muslim business establishments were left unscathed in Gokulpuri. Mostly tyre shops dealing in retreads, owned by Muslims from Bijnore and Muzaffarnagar, were set ablaze on third and fourth days on the violence, which began on February 23. A mosque was burnt down, another attacked. The families that stayed behind paid the price; those who shifted to safety proved wise.