On a humid afternoon in July, Mohammad Shahid can barely be heard over the noise in the bylanes of Jaffrabad as life continues undimmed. Occasionally Shahid turns his face to the wall. He is telling me about the 17 months that he spent in a Delhi jail before he was eventually charged with participating in the riots in the northeast of the city in February 2020, while then U.S. President Donald Trump was on a two-day visit to India.

So incensed were the Delhi Police by this coincidence that it noted in the chargesheet that there “could not have been a greater international embarrassment for the Government of India than to have communal riots raging in the national capital while a visit by the U.S. President was underway.” The riots began because supporters of the government’s arguably Islamophobic Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) — which essentially enables a path to Indian citizenship for illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, as long as they are not Muslim — attacked protestors.

Many observers alleged that the police aided and abetted the Hindutva mob. Fifty-three people, mostly Muslim, were killed in the violence and many hundreds were injured and displaced. Weeks after the riots, bodies were still being found in open drains.

Shahid has been home for about a year now, waiting for his trial to begin. He is one of 2,456 people who have been arrested, though nearly half have yet to be charged with any crime.

Sitting on a mattress in his apartment (one room and a tiny kitchen), Shahid describes his time in prison as a “blur of pain and panic.” He was eventually given bail after he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Shahid was also wounded in the riots, shot in the shoulder, a wound that festered and rotted in jail.

His health has improved since he’s been home but he’s still weak and traumatized. While he talks to me, his eyes sometimes filling with tears, his children play games on their phones. T The electronic bleeps from the phones, the lazy whir of the ceiling fan, and the voices in the street provide a surreal counterpoint as Shahid tells old his story.

“Sochne samajhne ki taakat bilkul khatam ho gayi hai,” he says. He no longer has the will or strength to make sense of what happened to him.

Over two years after the riots, the Delhi police continue to make arrests. Just last week, police arrested a man they claim played a role in the death of a police constable during the riots. Two policemen were killed and around 50 injured. A police spokesperson told reporters that many arrests are being made through facial recognition technology used on images from over 100 closed circuit cameras in the area.

The Delhi police continues to conflate the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act with “radical” Islamist groups and ideologies. Last month, the government of India banned a Muslim group called the Popular Front of India. Delhi police argued that the national ban vindicated its claims that the PFI had funded the anti-Citizenship Act protests as part of a conspiracy to foment communal violence. But the allegations remain unfounded and appear to portray Muslims en masse as having an agenda.

“This is about injustice,” says Shaziya, Mohammad Shahid’s wife. “We’ve been troubled ever since the day he was shot. I haven’t spent a day in peace in the last two years.” Shahid faces charges under 16 sections of the Indian Penal Code, including rioting and murder. And, his lawyers say, the police have little to go on except the surveillance technology it has used to identify people like Shahid. “Extensive use of technology in identification and arrest was the hallmark of investigation” into the riots, the Delhi Police wrote in its 2020 annual report.

This story was originally published in codastory.com . Read the full story here