By Betwa Sharma
Delhi: “That’s me, the one in the yellow shoes,” said Mohd Wasim, looking at a video of him and four other Indian Muslims who were bleeding, injured, and collapsed on the side of a road as policemen prodded them with their batons and forced them to sing the national anthem.
“Achee tarhan gaa (sing properly),” one of the policemen says in the video, which went viral in February 2020 as communal riots broke out in northeast Delhi.
When we met Wasim after a judicial magistrate ruled on his plea by ordering a criminal case nearly five years after the police committed this horrific act of violence and Islamophobia, the 20-year-old said, “I’m happy, but I’m also afraid.”
“Now I’m afraid that they will be even angrier. I’m afraid that if I go somewhere, what if they catch me or question me, lock me up or beat me again,” he said. “This fear is always there, and no one can protect me.”
Five years later, the policemen in the video have yet to be identified and prosecuted.
Wasim’s father, Attaullah, an electrician, chimed in.
“It has taken us five years to get an order for a case to be registered. It is unbelievable that we have to celebrate so little,” said Attaullah. “Will they take any action? We don’t know. All we can do is try and keep hoping.”
When we spoke with Wasim on 5 February, he didn’t know that a district court judge had already stayed the order for an FIR against the station house officer of the Jyoti Nagar police station, Salender Tomar.
On 17 February, we found out that, following a revision filed by Tomar, additional sessions judge Sameer Bajpai had stayed judicial magistrate Udhbav Kumar Jain’s order of 18 January 2025 on 1 February and set the next hearing for 17 April 2025.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.