On February 23, 2020, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra delivered an ultimatum against the crowds protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act: if the police did not remove them, he and his supporters would take the law into their own hands and evict them. Without hours of this violent threat, riots began in the city.
Passed in 2019 by the Modi government, the CAA allowed migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to become Indian citizens even if they had entered India illegally. The only criteria: they should not be Muslim. It was the first time religion had been made part of Indian citizenship law. The act had sparked protests across India.
For nearly a week after Mishra’s speech, North East Delhi saw intense violence. Mob action was combined with state atrocity, as numerous instances of policemen attacking Muslims emerged. By February 29, 53 people were dead – two-thirds of them Muslim.
Rather than blame the rioters or leaders like Kapil Mishra, who had been caught red-handed on camera inciting violence, the Delhi Police filed a sprawling case of conspiracy against leaders of the movement that opposed the CAA. My colleague Vineet Bhalla read through more than 30,000 pages of the chargesheets and found that there was little evidence to back the Delhi Police’s claims. The state was cynically using the violence to try and clamp down on peaceful protests.
Worse, even documented incidents of violence were ignored by the law. In one horrific incident, policemen were videotaped beating Muslim men and sadistically making them sing the national anthem. In spite of explicit video evidence and the death of one man, the policemen have faced no action. Watch this video report by my colleagues Kritika Pant and Aryan Mhatta tracking how the youngest in the group, Wasim, has been fighting for justice.
And Kapil Mishra? His incendiary speech was captured on camera, as he threatened violence in the presence of a senior police officer (who stood respectfully behind the BJP leader throughout the speech). Vineet Bhalla tracked the brave men and women who have long battled to see Mishra penalised. But the justice system has failed them at every stage. Not only has the executive avoided its responsibility to legally prosecute Mishra, most troublingly so has, it seems, the judiciary.
To rub it in, the BJP recently made Mishra Delhi’s law minister. A man who was caught on tape inciting riots is now responsible for the law portfolio in Delhi.
As Mishra’s incitement to violence is rewarded with a plum post, what about the leaders of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act movement? For months, lakhs of people came out across India to protest the act. Protecting the idea of India and the secular ideals of the Constitution should have been seen as an act of high patriotism. Instead, the Modi government has thrown them in jail, imprisoning them without trial. I spoke to Banojyotsna Lahiri, activist, researcher and partner of Umar Khalid, an anti-CAA activist who has been in prison for nearly five years now, on the toll his incarceration has taken.
It isn’t only the justice system: Indian journalism also seems to have forgotten the victims of the Delhi riots. Five years on, jokes cracked by comedians seem to make bolder headlines than the mass violence in the Indian capital.
Scroll’s series, Delhi 2020, looks back at the scarring violence. But at the end of the day, we are a small part of the Indian media. Politics, media and the judiciary: India seems to have forgotten the victims of the Delhi riots.
Read the Delhi 2020 series here:
Here is a summary of the week’s top stories.
The delimitation debate. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has called an all-party meeting on March 5 to discuss the impact of the Union government’s proposed delimitation exercise, which he claims could reduce his state’s Lok Sabha constituencies from 39 to 31. He urged all political parties to oppose the move because it unfairly penalises southern states that have successfully controlled the growth of their populations and fared better on human development indices.
Delimitation is the process of redrawing the boundaries of constituencies. The composition of the current Lok Sabha is based on the 1971 census. According to the 84th Amendment Act of 2001, the constituency boundaries were frozen until the first census after 2026, which would be due in 2031.
Stalin warned that delimitation threatens Tamil Nadu’s political rights. He wrote to several political parties in the state emphasising the need for a fair and transparent approach to fixing parliamentary representation. The Tamil Nadu Assembly had passed a resolution against the proposal in February 2024, fearing that it would give more weight in the Lok Sabha to northern states.
A day after Stalin’s comments, Union Home Minister Amit Shah claimed that South Indian states would not lose a single Lok Sabha seat on account of delimitation.
Scroll explains how an expanded Lok Sabha could see Hindi belt gain and South lose power at the Centre.
The economic situation. A new report by venture capital firm Blume Ventures estimates that one billion Indians, or nearly two-thirds of the country’s 1.4 billion population, lack the income to spend on discretionary goods, making them an unviable market for companies.
India’s “consuming class” comprises only 140 million people across 30 million households and only makes up 10% of the population of the country. It is effectively only as big as Mexico. Another 300 million people form the “aspirant” consumer class, with spending rising due to digital payments.
India’s consumer base is not expanding but becoming wealthier at the top, reinforcing a K-shaped post-pandemic recovery. Income inequality has widened sharply in India over the decades, with the top 10% now controlling 57.7% of national income, up from 34% in 1990. The richest 1% own 40.1% of total wealth, while the bottom 50% share just 6%, according to the World Inequality Report 2018.
Ashoka Mody writes about how bad political equilibrium in India makes for bad economics.
Convicted lawmakers in polls. The Union government has told the Supreme Court that it opposes a petition seeking to permanently bar politicians convicted in criminal cases from contesting elections. The Centre said disqualification periods were a matter of legislative policy and that imposing a lifetime ban falls solely within Parliament’s domain.
The government made the submission in response to lawyer Ashwini Upadhyay’s 2016 petition challenging the constitutional validity of Sections 8 and 9 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Section 8 of the Act states that individuals convicted of specified offences face a six-year disqualification after serving their sentence, while Section 9 disqualifies public servants for five years if they have been dismissed for corruption or disloyalty to the state. Upadhyay’s petition seeks to extend this disqualification to a lifetime ban.
The government argued that the existing provisions of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, were “constitutionally sound” and based on proportionality and reasonability.
Access blocked. India imposed 84 internet shutdowns in 2024, the second-highest globally after Myanmar’s 85, digital rights organisation Access Now has said in a new report. While India was not the worst offender for the first time since 2018, it still saw widespread blackouts, with Manipur recording the most at 21, followed by Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir with 12 each.
Of these, 41 were linked to protests and 23 to communal violence. Internet suspensions were also enforced during exams and elections. Globally, 296 shutdowns were reported across 54 countries, marking a record high. Shutdowns continued into 2025 in 47 instances, with 35 lasting over a year. Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, Palestine and Bangladesh also imposed several internet shutdowns in 2024, the report said.
Also on Scroll this week
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