Patience
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Patience Nikhil Roshan1
© O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) 2020
Abstract Hate-fuelled violence reconfigures the social landscape in figurative and literal senses: both the emotive fabric of friendship, neighbourhood, love, and the material landscape of the city’s streets, alleys, shopfronts, cars, buses, burial grounds. Hate-violence thus reimagines and re-images the world; restructures it normatively and physically. This photo-essay presents the visual aftermath of the February 2020 communal violence in Delhi. The photographs are situated in a narrative of the author’s personal journey to the sites of violence, along with the history of communal tension in the city and its periodic eruption (usually with the sanction of the State) into large-scale pogroms. Word and image combine to give us a visceral sense of the destruction of a lifeworld and of the personal and political negotiations that follow, through which survivors must, somehow, attempt to channel their anger and grief. Keywords Communal Violence · Citizenship · Partition · Emergency · Pogrom · Photography
Nikhil Roshan—Photographer. * Nikhil Roshan [email protected] 1
New Delhi, India
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Jindal Global Law Review
Fig. 1 A child surveys the damage done to Mustafabad’s Farooqia Mosque where he comes to pray every day
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Jindal Global Law Review
It couldn’t be clearer. Things have come full circle with the arrest of student leaders who lent their voices to protests against the unabashedly communal Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). The allegation? Fomenting riots. If any among us harboured the slightest sense of bewilderment or scepticism about what the silence of the gutted, debris-strewn streets of Northeast Delhi in the final week of February were telling us, these questions ought to be laid to rest: Were both sides culpable? Were there criminal gangs running amok? Was there a free flow of illegal arms in the area? (Fig. 1). The questions that need to be asked have been hollowed out and made irrelevant by the Delhi Police, under direct control of the Union Home Ministry. As if on autopilot, an all too familiar script is playing itself out now. Under the cover of the pandemic, innocent men and women, some themselves victims of violence, have been disappearing into the interrogation chambers of Delhi Police’s Special Cell. It is the hour once again to sacrificially propitiate the beast. On previous instances when this happened, it was with the help of special security laws like the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 (POTA), the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1987 (TADA) and the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 (MCOCA). This time, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA)—strengthened by assembling the most draconian bits from these earlier legislations1—is the battering ram. Last time, it was young men alleged to be radicalised members of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) who were targeted. In the crosshairs this time, is the Popular Front of Indi
