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. 

When we spoke with Mehmood Pracha, the Delhi-based advocate representing Wasim, he said he was not notified about the revision being heard in the district court and that the stay order was “passed behind their backs”.

Tomar has argued that an FIR already exists for the incident.

A murder case was registered against unknown persons on 28 February 2020 at the Bhajanpura police station in connection with Faizan, one of the five men who died two days after the incident.

After 11 months had passed without the police identifying those responsible, Faizan’s mother, Kismatun, moved the Delhi High Court in December 2020. 

In July last year, the Delhi High Court transferred the case from the Delhi crime branch to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). 

More than six months have passed. 

‘I Remember Everything’

Wasim was 17 years old when the police violence and Islamophobia on 24 February 2020 was captured on camera. 

The video shows a young man named Rafiq reciting the national anthem slowly and agonisingly as the other injured Muslims writhed on the ground next to him. 

Even though it has done little in the case, the Delhi High Court called it a “hate crime”. 

When we spoke with him in January 2021, a year after the incident, Wasim said he could not watch the video; “a feeling of terror runs through my whole body”. 

Five years later, Wasim said, “I still can’t watch the full video. I feel an explosive anger if I see or hear some of it.” 

Unemployed, Wasim is a class-10 graduate who has long stopped talking about the incident with his friends and family. He wants to move on, but it is difficult, he said.

“There are things that you don’t forget. I remember everything,” he said. “I may get some peace if they are punished, but let’s see if anything happens. Nothing has happened in five years.”

‘A Drought For 5 Years’

What was captured in the viral video was only part of the police violence that day. 

In the complaint that he filed months later, Wasim said that he was taken to the Jyoti Nagar police station and beaten, including by the station house office (SHO). 

Another man in the video, Faizan, who was also beaten in illegal police custody, died two days later. 

Over the next few weeks, the SHO summoned him and made him lie to news channels about how everything was fine. He sent a complaint to senior police officers and wrote to the home minister about how the police personnel he was accusing were threatening him, but nothing was done. 

When we asked what made him move the court, Wasim said, “They were really bothering me, pressuring me, threatening me and making me say all false things before the media. I was scared. I had had enough.”

In Wasim’s plea, Pracha said, “Judges changed, the police were given a very long rope, every aspect was argued in detail a number of times, threadbare.” 

To celebrate registering the FIR, Pracha said, "You have been facing a drought for five years, so one drop of water makes you happy. This is the most unfortunate part. Right now, I’m worried about their safety.”

Even if an FIR was to be registered, Attaullah said he knew how slow the investigation could be, and if the matter ever went to court, the legal proceedings could take years. He knew from experience that months passed before judges could find a date for another hearing. The police's delay made the pendency in the courts worse. 

“This is just the beginning,” said Attaullah. “Who knows what will happen and how long it will take.”

“Faizan’s mother lost her son, and she is still fighting a case. We are nothing in front of her,” said Shamim, Wasim’s mother. “Our efforts are nothing in front of hers. She has the courage and is standing up. We have to as well.” 

‘You Have To Vote For Change’

More than 50 people were killed in the communal riots that ravaged northeast Delhi in February 2020. Three-quarters were Muslim. 

Two weeks before the riots and the incident on 24 February 2020 that betrayed the police bias against Muslims, Delhi held its Assembly election. 

When we met on 5 February this month, the day Delhi was going to the polls again, Shamima recalled casting her vote five years ago. And then, with this one incident where the Muslims were forced to sing the national anthem as a way of humiliating them, she said she felt like an outsider in her city and country. 

“We go to vote, but then they also tell us you are different,” said Shamima. “One doesn’t always think about it, but it is in the mind.”

The conversation turned to the BJP leader Kapil Mishra, who was not standing from their constituency but a neighbouring one in northeast Delhi. 

In his complaint, Wasim said that before the police assaulted him on 24 February, he had seen Mishra leading a mob near the Kardampuri bridge, which was also a site where many Muslims had been gathering to protest the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. 

Wasim had seen Mishra fire gunshots at the protesters, and his accomplices shot at and threw stones and petrol bombs at the protesters. He said the police were supporting Mishra and throwing stones at the protesters. 

A day earlier, Mishra was near another anti-CAA protest site at the Jafrabad metro station, flanked by his supporters and the police, telling the police to clear the protesters or they would have to do it. 

So far, efforts to get the Delhi police to register an FIR against Mishra and investigate his role in the riots have been unsuccessful. 

In response to Wasim's complaint, the judicial magistrate told him to approach the special courts where FIRs are registered against current and former members of Parliament and the legislative assembly. 

“While there are Muslims who have spent time in jail in false cases against them, the police will not look at the role of powerful people,” said Attaullah. “How is this justice?”

Still, Shamima said, they would later that day when her household work was done, and they expected the lines to have thinned down. 

“Voting is our right,” she said. “You have to vote for change.”

On 8 February, Mishra won the riot-affected Karawal Nagar constituency, defeating the Aam Aadmi Party candidate by more than 23,000 votes. 

‘She Stood With Us’

In the weeks and months after the incident, Wasim and his family said that many people came to comfort, advise and even encourage them to take action. 

Of all the people who had come and gone, Shamima remembered one: Brinda Karat, a veteran communist leader and social activist. 

Shamima remembered that Karat did not lecture them from afar. 

“She did not come into our house, sit far away, or talk down to us,” said Shamima. “She spoke like you speak with people you consider your own.”

“Otherwise, where would we have found the courage to do this,” she said. “We would have just sat in a corner, scared, and let it go. But we did not.”

Attaullah said their lawyer Pracha told them they had to find the courage to see it through. 

“He said if you want to fight the case, anything can happen to you, you’ll have to keep courage, otherwise forget it, don’t do it,” he said. 

‘Life Keeps Going On’ 

A low-income family with Attaullah unwell and unable to work for long periods, his children went to work at an early age. 

Wasim worked in a tailor’s shop as a teenager. His younger brother is learning how to repair motorcycles, and his older brother supports them with what he makes as an Amazon delivery agent. 

A 21-year-old who has only studied until class 10, Wasim said he does not know what to do now and has little to look forward to. 

With so many people coming to meet them and offer support, Shamim said that she had hoped someone would help them in a way that would give them some lasting relief from their interminable financial woes; a job for her son is what she really wanted. 

But this experience had taught her to be wary of people's “tall promises,” including her own relatives—“even the close ones,” she said. 

“That was such a difficult time for us,” said Shamim. “We met everyone and gave them so much of our time. We hoped for some help that could help our situation.”

Still, it was not all gloom and doom, said Shamim as she spoke of her gallstone surgery that had gone off well, the marriage of a son and a daughter, and that she and Attaullah had not only become grandparents in the past five years, but maternal and paternal ones. They had a grandson and a granddaughter. 

“Life keeps going on,” she said. “Nothing stops.” 

(Betwa Sharma is managing editor of Article 14.)

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