2024: The year in which New India’s new normal was cemented
India’s people rarely reacted to lynching, abuse and discrimination against minorities, especially Muslims, as the state translated myth and bigotry into law.
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“I belong to the Muslim community and believe in Allah. Those belonging to my community hate Hindus.”
These were among the sentences Article 14 reporter Akansha Kumar found in 22 identical confessional statements by alleged Muslim rioters during her investigation this month of a 2023 riot in the Muslim-majority Haryana district of Nuh, the poorest in the state and eight-poorest nationally.
The common threads of the police cases she examined: copy-paste confessions; copy-paste but conflicting accounts by Hindu witnesses (most from the Hindu extremist Bajrang Dal); a post-mortem report that contradicted police claims; and vague, unsubstantiated claims of links with international terror group Al Qaeda.
Kumar’s findings corroborated a report by the People’s Union for Democratic Right released in July that found a “lack of any independent or corroborating evidence for arrest” in 81 of 89 bail orders studied by members of the advocacy group. “The bail was given because there was no evidence,” said former Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur at the release of the report. “Now, if there was no evidence, why were these persons arrested?”
“The police know if there is any evidence or if there is not any evidence,” said Justice Lokur, who was recently appointed chairperson of the United Nations’ Internal Justice Council. “They also know if there...
