LUCKNOW, India: The Muslims in the Indian Northern Uttar Pradesh State run by the Hindu Hardliner Yogi Adityanath have been living a desolate life since the notorious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) wreaked havoc throughout the so-called “Secular” Country.
Even the State Police in Uttar Pradesh have been turned into a lynching force, and forced the destitute Muslims to go through the worst ordeal of their life.
“I walk through many Muslim homes in U.P. (Uttar Pradesh), my eyes clouding, my heart sinking in shame, witness to their ruin after a rampage of hate by men in uniform. Cars and scooters are overturned and burned, television screens and washing machines smashed, cash and jewellery looted, crockery, even toys shattered, a lifetime of a family’s belongings devastated in minutes, the family inconsolable,” Harsh Mander, a human rights worker, writer and teacher, wrote in his article “A dangerous new low in state-sponsored hate” published in The Hindu on December 30.
Harsh Mander wrote that in Uttar Pradesh, the police force itself is becoming the riotous lynch mob.
“I have handled, as district officer, the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom and the violence resulting from the movement to demolish the Babri Masjid. Since I left the civil service, I worked closely with the survivors of the Gujarat and Muzaffarnagar (U.P.) carnages, and the earlier communal massacres of Nellie (Assam) and Bhagalpur (Bihar). What is unfolding in U.P. is on a scale and with a methodological deliberateness which I have not witnessed so far outside Kashmir and the North-East — touching a highly dangerous new low,” he wrote.
The writer mentioned that even the old citizens haven’t been spared at all by the police, and the Muslims with comparatively better living standards have especially been picked and subjugated to torture and assault. He stated that while the police baton-charge Muslim households in Uttar Pradesh, they also abuse them and shout at them saying they have to be suffering from it because they sought Azadi (independence).
The Muslims are so frightened that they don’t even dare to name any of the police officials, who subjected them to repression.
“There is an intense sense of terror among the entire Muslim population in urban U.P., the men dreading being charged with grave crimes; the women of attacks to their homes. Large parts of Muslim settlements have emptied out,” Harsh Mander wrote.
