Weekend Reads:

  1. Scroll.in’s Arunabh Saikia speaks to the Delhi rioters who tell him, chillingly, how they killed Muslims in the February violence: “I was the first to catch up with him, and hit him with my rod on his head... Then he fell down, and the public pounced on him after that…de dhana dhan dhan.”
  2. “When Hindu mobs next target a Muslim in any part of the country administered by Mr. Modi’s party, we can be sure that no police will stand in their way,” writes Hartosh Singh Bal in the New York Times.
  3. We still don’t have a clear idea of what happened to Ankit Sharma, a staffer of the Intelligence Bureau, who was among the 53 killed in the Delhi riots. Ayush Tiwari of Newslaundry, takes a look at the discrepancies in media coverage and offers a ground report with more context.
  4. There is no denying it: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has led to deeply negative coverage of India all over the world, as more countries recognise what his Hindu nationalist agenda has done to the country, writes James Manor in The Wire.
  5. This is how the Delhi government hopes to nip COVID-19 in the bud: “the integrated disease surveillance programme” which aims to keep track of all individuals diagnosed with it, and anyone who came into contact with them, reports Nikhil Ganekar for News18.
  6. In 2019, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies ran a disaster scenario about a Coronavirus that rapidly spreads through the world’s population. They convened 20 experts to discuss a response to such an eventuality, which you can read about on Politico.
  7. COVID-19 is not as deadly as you think it is, writes Jeremy Samuel Faust on Slate. Instead of everyone panicking about it, we need to focus on ensuring that the most vulnerable are given the best facilities and treatment.
  8. “What has happened in Wuhan is as if your house caught on fire and all your neighbors knew but forbade you from jumping out of the window.” An anonymous resident of Wuhan, China, writes for NPR about the “hell” that is the lockdown in the city that is at the centre of the COVID-19 breakout.
  9. Why did Elizabeth Warren lose the Democratic presidential primary in the United States even though it seemed like lots of important, vocal people loved her? Matthew Yglesias on Vox explains.
  10. A man was riding his cycle past a home where there was a burglary. He had an app on to track his exercise. Now, as Jon Schuppe writes for NBC News, he is a suspect.