Harsh Mander: Six years after the Delhi riots, the state’s defiant failings

Sadly with few exceptions, the record of the Indian state in securing justice and reparation for survivors of mass communal violence is badly tainted ever since the first major post-Independence riot in Jabalpur in 1961.

But even by the standards of this disgraceful record, the communal carnage in North East Delhi in 2020 stands apart. These communal clashes in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi were followed by the comprehensive and wanton denial by state authorities of rescue, relief, compensation and justice to the victims of the hate violence unleashed in the national capital.

In many ways, in its neglect of its duties to protect its citizens from violence and to assist them to rebuild their lives and secure justice, the union and state government in Delhi hit a new low. This constitutes one of the most dishonourable chapters in the Modi years.

The communal fury that engulfed this enclave of the national capital rose in the wake of the nationwide non-violent protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. In the winter of 2019-’20, ordinary citizens across India rallied spontaneously against this legislation because it was widely perceived to discriminate against Muslims by targeting their religious identity. This was seen as a frontal assault on India’s Constitution.

It burgeoned rapidly into the largest non-violent resistance movement that the Indian republic has seen, even bigger than the public uprising that I witnessed in my youth against the Emergency in the mid-1970s.

This unprecedented public resistance, with glimmerings of the idealism of the freedom struggle and iridescent displays of the unity and solidarity of people of all religions, castes and ethnicities, uniquely chose as its icon the Indian constitution. However, this singular movement of solidarity in a country of 1.4 billion people abruptly came undone.

The first blow was struck by this sudden conflagration of communal violence in the working- class district in north-east Delhi from February 23, 2020. This warring with the police and militants of the majority Hindu community on one side and their Muslim neighbours on the other smouldered for four days. It extinguished at least 53 lives, and yielded the extensive destruction of property, and the uprooting of thousands from religiously diverse neighbourhoods.

The second fatal blow on the people’s uprising against the new citizenship law was the punishing countrywide lockdown that the national government imposed a month after the communal violence, coercing the country’s 1.4 billion people indoors for many months.

As 30 million starving and desperate migrant workers hit the highways, undeterred by police batons and lockups, the surging collective public resistance against a citizenship law that discriminated against Indian Muslims quickly faded into a distant memory.

Failures to control the violence, and of rescue

To begin with, it bears repeating that it was the national capital which the violence lashed. This is the seat of both the national and Delhi governments. Delhi is also the national headquarters of the three armed forces and most paramilitary formations. If there was a will, what by any standards was a small skirmish in a working-class enclave of the capital city could have been controlled in literally a matter of hours. The fact that it continued unhindered for four days is a reflection not simply of dishonourable state incompetence. It is manifest evidence of criminal state complicity.

I have worked long enough as a civil servant handling and observing communal clashes to fathom that indisputably communal violence can continue beyond a few hours only if and when the state wishes for it to continue.

The communal violence in Delhi was ignited at least in part by a string of hate speeches by prominent leaders of the BJP, speeches that nakedly exhorted violence. Despite interventions in the Delhi High Court with which this writer was associated that sought that crimes be immediately registered against those guilty of inciting hate violence, and despite strong admonitions by the acting Chief Justice S Muralidhar, to which I will return later, the police refused to register crimes against any of them.

One of those who called for the shooting of “traitors to the nation”, dog-whistling Indian Muslims, was elevated to a union cabinet minister. Another is today the law and justice cabinet minister of the Delhi government. I shall circle back to the fate of this petition later in this essay.

The first duty of the state was to prevent and control the violence. In this it wantonly failed. It failed also in its next urgent duty, to rescue those whose lives, homes and properties were threatened by the riotous mobs. Instead, more than 13,000 desperate calls to the police seeking protection from the marauding mobs went unheeded.

When my own efforts to stir the government at its highest levels failed, I made a public call for volunteers to set up a citizens’ control room of the Karwan e Mohabbat. Within hours of my call, more than 40 young people gathered in my office, and did not leave for five days. I requested Shashikant Senthil, who had recently resigned from the Indian Administrative Service and is now a Lok Sabha MP, and Kannan Gopinath to head the citizen control room. They both flew into the city and steered the citizens’ control room.

Desperate calls thronged our control room as soon as it was operationalised. One particularly insistent call came from a clinic in the area of combat torn apart by the communal carnage. The doctor in the clinic described the dire plight of boys and men with bullet injuries in his care, who could be saved only if they were rushed to hospitals. But the mobs and the police would not allow even ambulances to move. Two people had died in his clinic and at least 20 were in imminent danger of death if they were not reached to hospitals without further delay. Even wartime ethics mandate the free movement of injured people to hospitals. But not in Delhi’s battleground.

It took our midnight intervention, by Karwan e Mohabbat volunteer lawyers Suroor Mander and Chariyu, once again with Justice Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court, for the police to be directed by the court to ensure the safe movement of ambulances. This order saved not just these 20 but hundreds of other lives of injured and threatened people, now that the police responded to our calls from the citizens’ control room to protect the movement of ambulances and rescue vans through the area inflamed by the violence. But it is shameful that it required the High Court to move the police to fulfil its most elementary duty to ensure that lives were saved in the midst of the fires of communal hatred.

Failures of relief

The state government initially took no steps to establish relief camps. In this it followed in the ignoble footsteps of the Gujarat government in 2002. I had in 2002 believed that no government could so shamefully abdicate its duties of relief and rehabilitation in the way that the Gujarat state government led by Narendra Modi did. The Delhi state government proved me wrong. It sank the bar even lower.

When criticised widely for its refusal to set up relief camps, the Delhi government then designated nine homeless shelters as relief camps. This was nothing more than a cruel insult to the thousands who had been rendered homeless by the violence. Homeless shelters are bare tin sheds in which homeless people are packed body to body, especially in winter months, in unsanitary and undignified conditions. How could these conceivably double up as places of safety and healing for the thousands displaced by the communal violence?

In the Indian Administrative Service in which I served, officers are trained to establish relief camps in the immediate aftermath of natural and human-made disasters even in remote and deprived areas amidst widespread devastation.

Delhi, the national capital, was abundant in plentiful resources like stadiums, college buildings, civil volunteer formations, the National Cadet Corps, the National Service Scheme and myriad professional groups. The government could have easily deployed these to establish exemplary relief camps. Instead, the state government chose to offer no effective relief to those battered in the communal storms.

Denial of compensation

The story of compensation – described in detail in the report of the Karwan e Mohabbat titled The Absent State: Denial of Reparation & Recompense to the Survivors of the 2020 Delhi Pogrom – is even more dismal. The union government did not announce a compensation scheme and in the six years that have passed since then has not extended a single rupee to the survivors of the violence.

The state government started off better, but this lasted only the first weeks of the distribution of ex gratia relief and death compensations. It at least announced a compensation scheme, although at levels much lower than for the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 that had also unfolded in the national capital. Officials of the Delhi state government in 2020 did effectively distribute ex gratia relief and death and injury compensation in the immediate days after the carnage. But then it beat a baffling and ignoble retreat.

In March itself, barely a month after the carnage, at a time when the victim survivors were battling the catastrophic consequences of both the riots and the Covid-19 lockdown, the Delhi government suddenly – and without any public explanation – rescinded from its responsibility of helping the victim survivors of the carnage to rebuild their lives. It instead approached the Delhi High Court to set up a separate agency to assess and distribute compensation.

This was inexplicable and inexcusable, not just when viewed from the yardstick of the elementary ethics of humane governance; but also because it was bad in law. Rescue, relief, compensation and rehabilitation of those hit by communal and caste violence is after all a fundamental duty of the state. This duty derives directly from the constitutional fundamental right to life of those felled by violence.

That there was no rationale for seeking the delegation of this duty to an external body was problematic enough. The exit of the state government from its constitutional duties was compounded by the agency that the High Court designated for this task. This was a commission that in fact had been established for a very different, even contrary purpose to that of aiding the victims of communal violence.

This was to assess losses to public properties in the violence, the costs of which were to be recovered from the rioters. This goal has little in common with the one of compensating the victim survivors for their losses in the communal violence.

Entrusted now with this onerous and entirely distinct responsibility of extending fair compensation to the survivors of the communal violence, the commission first took as long as seven months even to begin its work, seemingly unmindful of the plight of the survivors who battled the grief, loss and damage to their livelihoods by the riots and the lockdown unaided by the state.

The commission then appointed private evaluators to assess the damage and loss suffered by survivors. This was manifestly a public duty. The process and norms deployed by these private evaluators was not made public.

Neither the evaluators nor the commission heard those who had suffered the losses. They typically gave no reasons for their assessments. And the commission made no provision for even a single appeal against the assessments. The assault on the fundamental rights of the victims of the violence did not end here.

The commission, in the small number of petitions for which it did pass orders, decided levels of compensation that were a tiny fraction of the actual damage. All of this flies against all principles of natural justice.

But the denials did not end here. Even these meagre amounts did not actually reach the hands of the victim survivors. The commission announced that the state government had allotted to it no funds to actually disburse even the small sums of compensation it has fixed. A scrutiny of the budgets of the state government, even for 2020 and for all the years since, reveals that there was not even a budget line and absolutely no budgetary funds set aside for payment of compensation.

If the state government did not set aside public resources for compensating the victim survivors, how did it expect that the commission to which it has shifted its responsibility would actually succeed in any way in giving victims the amounts that it fixed to rebuild their lives?

In a total budget of the Delhi government of around Rs 75,000 crore, even generous provisions of compensation would not have exceeded 1%-2% of this total. Obviously then, the denial of compensation to the victim survivors of the 2020 Delhi communal violence is not a small oversight necessitated by a shortage of funds. Its motives lie elsewhere.

I am left with no option except to conclude that – like its refusal to try to prevent the violence, to rescue those whose lives and properties were threatened by marauding mobs, and to extend relief to those who were rendered homeless – the denial of compensation to the survivors even six years after the violence is a deliberate denial that is unconscionable for a democratic government pledged to uphold its duties under the constitution.

Comprehensive failures of justice

The comprehensive subversion of justice by the Delhi Police is no less spectacular. Subversion is not enough to describe what has transpired. It is actually the intentional destruction by the state of any possibility of justice to the survivors of the violence.

Numerous independent media and citizen reports and even court judgments indicate how the effort of the Delhi police seems to have been consistently perverse, to protect and punish the perpetrators of the violence and to criminalise innocent victims. After the Delhi communal violence of 2020, the police registered 758 FIRs, including one claiming that protestors against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 and those active in relief work were actually conspirators who planned the communal carnage.

In what came to be known as the “Delhi riots conspiracy case”, the Delhi Police claimed that the protestors against the citizenship amendment had actually hatched the riots as an act of terror to secure a regime change. Eighteen student leaders, activists and a politician spent years in prison for this charge, without even a trial commencing six years after the communal carnage. Five of them continue to languish behind bars.

A significant investigation by BBC Hindi reported in 2025 that five years after the deadly communal riots, no legal closure was in sight for the people involved. It examined the status of all the 758 cases filed and analysed the 126 cases in which the Karkardooma court in Delhi had given decisions. It shockingly found that of the 126 cases, more than 80% had resulted in acquittals or discharges as witnesses turned hostile, or did not support the prosecution’s case. Only 20 of these cases saw convictions.

In many cases, the courts raised serious doubts about the integrity of the investigation of the police, suggesting that they framed innocent persons and absolved the guilty of their crimes. The police officers who deliberately sabotaged justice also, were rarely punished.

Its detailed analysis of these 126 orders also showed that in several of these cases, the court heavily criticised the Delhi police for lapses in investigations. In some, the police had filed “predetermined chargesheets” for “falsely implicating” the accused. In most of the 126 cases, police officials were presented as witnesses, but the court did not find their testimonies credible.

There were inconsistencies in the police statements, delays in identification of the accused by the police and, in some instances, doubts over whether policemen were even present when the violence broke out.

The conviction rate in cases that went to trial was most dismal in cases related to murder. There were 62 such cases among the 758 cases that were filed. Among these, there was only one conviction and four acquittals.

In a similar analysis by The Indian Express, reporters looked carefully at the 116 riot cases in which verdicts had been delivered. A very high number of 97 of these decisions ended in acquittals. In nearly one of every five cases, judges seriously censured the Delhi Police for grave misconduct, such as “fabricated” evidence, “fictitious” witnesses, and “foisted” cases.

In 12 judgements, the court observed that the police had brought in “artificial” witnesses and in many ways “fabricated” evidence. In two cases, witnesses themselves testified that police officials had dictated their statements. In one acquittal, the judge observed, “There has been an egregious padding of evidence by the IO,” the judge stated. “Such instances lead to serious erosion of the faith of the people in the investigating process and the rule of law.”

The Indian Express found that many court orders poked holes in the case built up by the prosecution. One judge noted that a key witness’s existence “comes under a shadow of doubt, and the possibility of him being a fictitious person cannot be denied.” In two near-identical orders, a court went so far as to believe that the police knew their case was “fabricated” because they failed to conduct a Test Identification Parade.

Other judicial observations that render the police highly culpable of deliberately countermining justice include the “probable manipulation in the case diary” and an “artificial claim” by a police constable.

These recurring indictments by the courts of the ignominious role of the police point to a profound systemic rot in the criminal justice system. There can be little doubt of its complete surrender to the unconstitutional and unlawful political project of the ruling establishment, of its discreditable purpose of protecting persons from the majority Hindu community who were guilty of hate murders, injuries, loot and arson.

The failures of justice is illustrated also by the case of a hate speech by BJP leader Kapil Mishra, which I have spoken of earlier. Many believe this speech was the immediate spark that ignited the communal violence. In February 2023, in the presence of a senior police officer, this MLA gave an ultimatum to the Delhi police to remove the anti-CAA protestors from the streets, threatening that he and his men would otherwise take matters into their own hands.

Even as the violence was still smouldering, a division bench of justices S Muralidhar and Talwant Singh heard my urgent petition seeking the registration of an FIR against Mishra and other senior leaders whose hate speeches openly incited violence. Justice S Muralidhar ordered the playing of the videos of the speeches in the court of Mishra’s and other hate speeches by senior BJP leaders.

The two-judge bench found their statements amounted to “hate speech” and strongly urged the Delhi Police to lodge FIRs against them. The Solicitor General told the court that the police would identify an “appropriate time” to file the FIR. Justice Muralidhar directed the Delhi Police to take a decision in 24 hours on filing an FIR against Mishra for his remarks. But that same midnight, Justice Muralidhar was directed to hand over his charge immediately.

Senior advocate Indira Jaising said the police not registering a crime in Mishra’s case amounted to “selective amnesty”. The Supreme Court, she said, has clearly ruled that the police must register an FIR when they receive information about a cognisable offence. “It is like giving amnesty to someone before you have even commenced an investigation,” said Jaising. “You can call it selective amnesty or impunity.”

One Mohammad Ilyas, a resident of North East Delhi, also approached a magistrate seeking investigation into the role of Kapil Mishra in the riots. The Delhi Police stoutly defended Mishra in the court, stating that he had already been “investigated” in connection with the larger conspiracy case and had been found to bear no role in triggering the riots.

The police did not stop here. They further alleged that efforts to name Mishra were part of a “false propaganda” campaign orchestrated to discredit him.

In a rare and salutary example of judicial independence, the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Vaibhav Chaurasia, rejected both these claims. He noted the communal overtones in Mishra’s language during his interrogation. Mishra would refer to Muslims as “them” and “that side”, revealing a communal mindset. Also Mishra himself admitted to the court that he was accompanied by a group of 50-60 supporters at the protest site when he made his contested speech, and this was a cognisable offence.

He admitted he made a public call in his speech to “get the place vacated”. The judge also noted that DCP Ved Prakash Surya was present at the spot when Mishra made his speech, but he was not investigated.

However, despite the sterling judgment by this judge of conscience, the ends of law were still unfulfilled. The Delhi Police challenged the order in the court of the Additional Sessions Judge Kaveri Baweja, who stayed any further investigation. Legal experts told Frontline that this order by judge Baweja was very unusual, possibly unlawful, because courts rarely stay investigations while these are still under way.

Six years later, no FIR is still registered against Mishra. The “appropriate time” to register the FIR – that the Solicitor General Tushar Mehta had spoken when the Delhi High Court was hearing my petition seeking an FIR against Mishra – had clearly still not come.

The Delhi police instead filed a case under the anti-terror law UAPA charging 18 activists and student leaders, mostly of Muslim identity, of the conspiracy that I spoke of, to engineer the violence as an act of terror for regime change. The speeches were protesting a law which many across the country regarded as violative of the pledges of the condition. They were not hate speeches. Mishra meanwhile was elected on a BJP ticket to the Delhi assembly in the spring of 2025, and was inducted into the cabinet.

That too as the minister of law and justice.

A highly regarded retired judge of the Supreme Court Madan Lokur told BBC Hindi, “If the prosecution throws (innocent) people into jail just because they have the power to do this, they should not be allowed to get away with this. If the incarceration is found to be unjust or unnecessary – people stay in prison for many years before they get bail – the people who falsely framed them should be punished.”

With so many acquittals, he said the prosecution and police “should sit down to introspect what they have achieved in five years”. He said that “accountability needs to be fixed on the prosecution as well if the arrest is found to be illegal or unnecessary”.

The judge felt called upon to declare that “when history looks at the Delhi riots, one thing that will pierce (the public conscience) is that the Delhi police did not investigate the crimes of the riots correctly. This failure will certainly trouble the defenders of democracy”.

Six years after the communal conflagration that destroyed the lives, livelihoods, dwellings, social relations and trust of thousands of working-class families in the national capital, the state continues to be conspicuously, brazenly, even defiantly missing in action.

I am grateful for research support from Sumaiya Fatima

Harsh Mander is a peace and justice worker and author. He leads the people’s campaign for solidarity, support and justice for survivors of lynching and hate violence. He is a visiting faculty in the South Asia Institute in the University of Heidelberg. His newest book, Under Grey Smoggy Skies: Living Homeless on the Streets of India’s Cities, is in bookstores.