(This is the third part of details from Delhi Police’s charge sheet on Delhi riots. The first one talked of Shaheen Bagh and its role; the second one was how the conspirators got their funds. This piece is on how anti-CAA and Riots were part of a larger design of pan-Islamic identity).
Delhi Police, in its charge sheet on Delhi riots, has no doubt that it was an engineered and not spontaneous riots and it qualified as nothing else but terrorism. This is how it has described the heinous act:
“Causing death of over 50 persons and causing serious injuries to over 500 public persons, apart from massive damage to public and private parties by arson and other means would also clearly fall within the definition of terrorist activity…
“Disruption of supplies and services essential to life of community squarely falls within the ambit of terrorist act.”
Delhi Police, in its charge sheet, has explained how a “terrorist act” is defined.
“In this case, the use of firearms, petrol bombs…causing death of a police personnel and grievous injuries…with intention to overawe the state and force the central government to withdraw CAA, NRC clearly falls in the definition of terrorist activity.”
The Delhi Police Special Cell has charge sheeted 15 people under the stringent UAPA and it includes former AAP councillor Tahir Hussain, Pinjra Tod’s Devangana Kalita, Jamia Millia Islamia PhD student Meeran Haider and Safoora Zargar, Jamia Coordination Committee media coordinator, among others.
The final report, signed by DCP (Special Cell) P S Kushwah and ACP (Special Cell) Alok Kumar, states that “internationally, terrorist activity is defined as the use of violence to force a government to accept/submit to political demands”.
WhatsApp groups such as DPSG (Delhi Police Support Group) and Warriors figure prominently in the charge sheet.
Damningly, the charge sheet states that “they (conspirators) aimed at bringing the government of India to its knees and enforcing the withdrawal of CAA by timing the execution of their conspiracy with the visit of US President, thereby hitting two birds with a single stone.”
“From the day that the results of the 2019 Parliamentary elections were declared, the tone and tenor of the public utterances of the key conspirators of the present case has shown a clear streak of affinity towards violence which had started playing out in their minds.”
The report concludes that the “end objective of all the conspirators had conspired was to uproot a lawfully elected government by sheer use of engineered, vicious and visceral communal violence”.
Police have attached transcripts of the chats between Swaraj India leader Yogendra Yadav, filmmakers Rahul Roy and Saba Dewan, Pinjra Tod’s Kalita and Narwal, CPI’s Annie Raja, Rakshita Swamy of MKSS, activists Harsh Mander and Anjali Bhardwaj.
Further, “The conspiracy grew in an organic manner from the formation of a group called MSJ (Muslim Students of JNU), an overtly communal seed that was sown after CAB… to the subsequent formation of JCC and finally the emergence of DPSG, which provided a secular facade and naxal genes of violent resistance to an otherwise radically communal agenda”.
“The conspirators, by their ingenuity and criminality of thoughts, presented an entirely new dimension to the meaning of ‘hate speech’ — theirs was covered in the sugarcoat of nationalism which hit the sour and sordid truth that it was in fact a well-thought out attempt at igniting and reinforcing a pan-Islamic identity.”
