Remembering the 2020 Delhi Communal Pogrom with Five Films |
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Six years have passed since a predominantly working-class district in the national capital of Delhi was bloodied and singed by four days of communal violence.
As Delhi bled and burned from February 23 to 26, 2020, government agencies did almost nothing to prevent and quell the violence, rescue those who were threatened by marauding mobs, establish decent and safe relief camps, ensure timely and adequate reparations, secure justice to the victims, hold police officials who failed in their duties and instead encouraged the mobs and join in the targeted violence, and bring the estranged families together.
Why do we regard it to be a public duty to remember, six years after those tragic days? Some may say that this only scrapes old wounds, and so we should move on and forget. However, I am convinced that we have the right to “move on” and forget only when the victim survivors of the targeted hate violence are able to move on.
A young man who spent several months in hospital recovering after a series of operations from bullet injuries said, “The wounds on my body have healed. The wounds on my soul have not”.
How can the wounds on the souls of the residents of north-east Delhi heal when even six years later, almost none of those who wreaked hate violence have been punished for their crimes?
When instead, the Delhi Police has closed the large majority of cases?
When in the overwhelming proportion of cases that have gone to trial, the accused men are acquitted and the courts have decried the fake........