This is the last essay in a three-part article series critiquing the Delhi Government’s Assistance Scheme for the rehabilitation of survivors of the Northeast Delhi riots. Names, where necessary, have been changed. Read the first and second parts of the series here and here, respectively.
“Aankhon ke saamne hi rehta hai [it is always in front of my eyes],” – it never leaves me, Fatima says. On the phone, she switches back and forth between speaking of the riots that forced her to leave home last February and feeding her two-year-old daughter, Noor. She is only 23 years old herself.
Almost one year ago, on February 24, Fatima woke up to a panicked phone call at around three in the morning. On the other end, her brother spoke of the violence breaking out across Northeast Delhi and begged her to leave Shiv Vihar, where she and the rest of her family – her daughter, husband, parents, and younger brother – live together. Fatima didn’t leave. Later that morning, at around seven, a few neighbours warned her father again; the family was told to lock the house and run before the mobs came looking. Still, no one left. She says now, “We had nothing to be afraid of. We hadn’t done anything wrong.”
When the first man arrived, only half the family had woken up. “I was eating breakfast,” she says, when there was a loud clanging sound outside. A man with a vermillion forehead was standing at the gate, beating it with a stick. When Fatima called through the window to ask who he was and what he wanted, the man told her to gather her family and run. Run, or wait here and see what happens when the others come, he said. She would wait and see, she said. In fear, now, her father pulled her back and began preparing to leave.
Also read: Loopholes in Compensation Disbursement Leave Delhi Riots Victims’ Families in Limbo
Within minutes, a handful of helmeted men had gathered in front of the house. One began throwing rocks through the windows, a few others brandished their jerricans of petrol and threatened to set it ablaze. A neighbour, an elderly woman living a few houses away from Fatima, stood firmly behind the rioters, encouraging them to avenge the Hindus that had supposedly been killed by Muslims the day before; and, as the number of men increased, the family ran out of the back door.
They ran through empty back-alleys – jumping at every stray sound, careful of corners – and continued running until the local masjid was in sight. (At the time, Fatima and her family did not know that a number of masjids across Northeast Delhi were being, or would be, fire-bombed, razed to the ground.) At the masjid, Fatima called the police over and over again; on more than half her attempts, the call was not answered.
Once, someone picked up. She begged them to come to rescue them, to take them to neighbouring Chaman Park, where her brother lived. The man on the line offered this advice: ask your men to shave their beards, mark a tilak on their foreheads, and try your luck.
After 40 minutes of trying to reach the police, Fatima’s father began calling a helpline number connecting to the deputy chief minister’s office. Soon after, he was told that help was on its way, and after about another hour of panicked waiting, a few armed officers arrived at the masjid to escort them out. (Here, it is important to note that Fatima and her family are one of the precious few that can say they were helped by law enforcement agencies during the riots; the majority of survivors, instead, have reported immense mistreatment at the hands of the Delhi Police.)
On the main road, not far from the house, from within a crowd chanting “Go back to Pakistan,” a man mere feet from Fatima said to her, “Bachh gaye Mussalmano, nahi toh idhar hi jala deta,” – you’ve barely escaped, Muslims, or else I’d have set you on fire right here. An officer walking beside the family said, “Don’t bother with them,” but did nothing else.
A week or so later, Fatima and her father visited the house. The rioters had taken most of their possessions: the refrigerator, jewellery, one-and-a-half lakh rupees worth of savings; and had dragged the rest – their clothes, their mattresses – outside and burned it on the street. Almost nothing was left intact.
Fatima and her family lived in a small two-room apartment in Chaman Park for the next five months, too afraid to return to Shiv Vihar. In August, after months under lockdown without an income and no way to pay rent any longer, they were forced to vacate and go home.
Despite submitting an application under the Delhi government’s Assistance Scheme in March itself, Fatima is yet to receive compensation for the looting of her house. On visits to the office of the sub-divisional magistrate (Karawal Nagar), she is turned away with ambiguous promises that the case is under consideration on rare good days, that the money will come soon; on the overwhelming majority of bad days, she is left unattended, sent back with sharp words and asked not to be so bothersome.
With time, a few neighbours close to Fatima told her the truth of who had stolen some of her other things: a gas cylinder had been taken away by a family across the street, another that replaced her father’s new LCD television with their old, broken set, and another that took their good utensils away. Fatima says she has never tried to bring it up with her neighbours — “What can I even say to them?”
Mending fractured communities
Twenty-eight years ago, in 1992, right-wing Hindu groups gathered in Ayodhya to demolish the Babri Masjid; in the weeks immediately following, violence erupted in cities all across India. In Mumbai, the rioting lasted several weeks, claiming, by some estimates, more than a thousand lives and displacing tens of thousands more.
As with present-day Northeast Delhi, survivors in post-riot Mumbai suffered not only from immense material damages, but felt – and rightfully so – entirely abandoned by the state and its officials, and dangerously pitted against other religious communities, their neighbours and civic networks.
Shop owners look at the charred remains of the tyre market in riot affected Gokulpuri area of North East Delhi, March 7, 2020. Photo: PTI
Within this climate of distrust and immense pain, social workers, concerned citizens, and representatives from law enforcement organised themselves as mohalla committees and began working to address two specific concerns: remedying community relations with the police and fostering communal harmony.
Usha Thakkar, in an article in the Economic and Political Weekly, traces the genesis and workings of Mumbai’s mohalla committees. Each committee employed a variety of mechanisms to these ends, such as including citizen oversight on the policing of neighbourhoods, improving municipal services such as access to water and educational opportunities for the youth, and programming that brought Hindus and Muslims together through open conversation, and honest reflections on the tensions between the two religious groups. Thakkar characterises their work as having “made a difference in the way people think about communal disturbance at [the] local level and the strategies that can be devised to lessen it.”
In meetings held immediately after the Northeast Delhi riots, the Delhi government, too, made its intention clear to establish peace committees at the mohalla level in riot-affected neighbourhoods. Ostensibly, the work of these committees was to help local government and the police regain – through meaningful attempts at institutional reform and citizen-involvement in the administration of their neighbourhoods – the trust of riot survivors; and to bridge the increasingly fraught divide between the two communities.
However, instead of attempting community-centred social work, the Delhi government has established a Committee on Peace and Harmony, which — far removed from the experiences of life in Northeast Delhi — entrusts elected officials with the task of considering complaints of communal tension and recommending suitable solutions to foster harmony.
The committee makes no pretence of giving voice to riot survivors themselves, nor shares with them any decision-making powers on the matters of institutional reform and community-building. In short, unlike Mumbai’s mohalla committees, it does little to challenge communal ideologies dominant in Northeast Delhi and makes no progress toward building back the trust riot survivors have lost in the state.
Also read: Delhi Riots: Police, SDM Office Dithered on Compensation Claims for Months Before HC Order
As a result, then, the trauma of fractured community relations – the ever-looming threat of violence, and the sudden absence of social networks that support families living together – and the visceral sense of alienation from the state have become abiding realities for Delhi’s riot survivors.
“Apna ghar apna nahi lagta hai abh,” – my house doesn’t feel like it’s mine anymore, Fatima says on the phone. She sees the man who threatened to set her family on fire is walking free around the neighbourhood, living an ordinary life, as if nothing has happened.
By contrast, Fatima drifts in and out of sleep at night almost one year later. She checks the locks twice and watches for disturbances through her window. She listens for warnings of violence compulsively and jumps at every loud sound. “I don’t know if that man remembers me, but I will never forget him,” she says.
The state’s responsibility to riot survivors
What, then, does the state owe to riot survivors, if neither material compensation, nor safe, caring communities in which to live? By its own admission, nothing – or nothing, at least, that can be considered a legal confirmation of its guilt, or an acknowledgement of, or reparations for, its own hand (by design or negligence) in the riots.
What it does for survivors – the meagre compensations, the long and arduous struggles with forms, and papers, and other inscrutable bureaucracies — is ex-gratia, or at its own discretion: a favour, a gesture of goodwill.
An ex-gratia payment is a state acting in its generosity, its big-heartedness and compassion for the dispossessed; these efforts are not to be construed as a result of its liability – its legal obligation to remedy the suffering it has caused to riot survivors.
The state’s insistence on offering only ex-gratia payments as compensation neglects several years of jurisprudence – not to mention fundamental moral imperatives – that affirm its legal obligation to repair the lives of riot survivors.
Twenty-four years ago, for example, Bhajan Kaur – who was widowed in the riots of 1984 – moved the Delhi high court in a challenge against the meagre twenty-thousand rupees awarded to her as compensation for the lynching of her husband.
In his judgement, Justice Anil Singh notes: “Riots, more often than not, take place due to [the] weakness, laxity and indifference of the administration in enforcing law and order.”
The court characterises riots, then, as a failure of the state; in particular, it considers riots a violation of Article 21 of the constitution of India, which tasks the state with the protection of a person’s life and personal liberty.
To take Justice Singh’s reasoning a step further, one might argue that a riot often continues taking place as a result of the state’s failure to maintain law and order, but begins, in earnest, long before the first petrol-bomb is thrown, or the first house looted.
DRP convent school, burnt during the northeast Delhi riots. Photo: PTI
The state, then, must bear the responsibility for the killing of Bhajan Kaur’s husband – and the deaths, injuries, and damages suffered by the thousands of riot victims that have come after him, too, including Fatima.
It must acknowledge riots as a phenomenon borne not only of incompetent, or malicious, law enforcement officials, but of a state unable – or unwilling – to foster harmony amongst its citizens. As such, the state’s attempts to repair the lives of riot survivors must not come in the guise of discretionary awards, or favours, but as indictments of its own conduct, legal obligations following its failure to provide for the people – all its people.
Re-imagining compensation
The state, in executing its obligations toward riot survivors, must endeavour to establish a thoughtful and multi-faceted reparations programme — an effort capable of reaching as many victims as possible, and of effectively addressing their varied needs.
Pablo de Greiff – a senior fellow at the New York University’s Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice – offers, in his introduction to The Handbook of Reparations, a careful reading of different measures against which the efficacy of a reparative programme can be assessed.
Completeness, in de Greiff’s words, refers to “the ability of a program to cover…the whole universe of potential beneficiaries”. How complete an effort at reparations is – or, how many survivors it can reach – is determined, largely, by two factors: the evidentiary standards that a survivor must meet to qualify as a beneficiary, and the ease with which a survivor can access the programme.
By mandating that survivors register and submit first information reports (FIRs) in order to receive compensation for cases of looting, for example, the government greatly limits the number of victims that will qualify as legitimate beneficiaries under its scheme.
Here, knowing fully well the gravity of allegations against law enforcement officials, the state makes no attempts at organising a rehabilitative scheme that minimises a riot survivor’s contact with the police; instead, it makes receiving compensation entirely dependent on police cooperation.
Similarly, the Delhi government’s Assistance Scheme has done little to make its benefits readily available to riot survivors, further impeding how far the programme can cast its net. Mandating in-person submissions of applications and establishing arbitrary and narrow deadlines for the submission of claims, for example, makes it such that many survivors may never submit claims at all.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal pays tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat in New Delhi during the riots in the northeast Delhi. Photo: Twitter.
In fact, the absolute opacity of the compensation system – its haphazard damage assessment process, its disregard for standardised and codified procedures of operation, and its immense and unwarranted faith in the integrity of its administrators – leaves room for state officials to reject applications without ever furnishing survivors with reason.
Further, it allows the intimidation of survivors into withdrawing, or, at the very least, losing faith in the efficacy of existing applications for compensation. These methods of coercion vary in the scales of their violence, from badgering applicants to tears, to denying information on the status of claims for such long periods of time that victims simply give up.
The Delhi government, then, not only makes it a significant challenge for survivors to submit claims in the first place, it also creates the necessary conditions for state officials to reject claims without reason, and – if this were not enough – to stretch the wills of victims until they abandon the claims they have already submitted. As a result, what was once a large “universe of potential beneficiaries” whittles down over time to a convenient handful – the survivors of the compensation process.
In judging an effort at reparations, de Greiff also deploys the concept of complexity, or the different ways in which the state tries to repair the lives of riot survivors.
A complex reparative programme might provide financial assistance in addition to free medical care for the injured, or mental health counselling for traumatised groups and individuals, and, amongst still other kinds of assistance, business loans to small entrepreneurs who have lost their livelihoods in the riots.
Also read: Rights Groups Lament Slow Pace of Disbursal of Compensation for Delhi Violence
The Delhi government’s scheme, instead, is a rather primitive effort: it offers nothing more than monetary compensation – and, as we have argued in this article series, its ability to do this well, too, is significantly compromised.
But, we must not ascribe the absence of complexity in the assistance scheme to an ignorance of how to craft an effective and multi-faceted reparations programme. On February 27, in a meeting under the chairmanship of the chief minister of Delhi, instructions were given to the Delhi financial corporation to provide subsidised business loans to survivors whose businesses had suffered in the riots; and to specialist doctors at the Vidyasagar Institute of Mental Health, Neuro & Allied Sciences to provide counselling to victims, too.
And yet, upon enquiring this month with the financial corporation, it seemed that no such scheme has ever seen the light of day – in fact, no official orders on the particulars of such a service seem to have been received at all.
Further, as with its business loans, the government has failed to deliver on its promises of providing mental health counselling as well. Varna Balakrishnan and Meera Viswanathan, writing on the mental health crisis left in the wake of the riots, observe the absolute lack of resources available “to help victims reconcile with the trauma of communal violence”.
In such a grave absence of support, the memories of persecution will embed themselves not only “in the minds of every survivor, but also in that of their children and grandchildren” – marking, for many, the beginning of a genealogy of trauma and fear.
The remarkable discrepancies, then, between the government’s articulated intentions and the despairing realities of life in post-riot Delhi today suggest, if nothing else, a weak political will, and indifference toward the well-being of survivors.
One year later, the Delhi government cannot claim they did not know what to do, or how best to meet the needs of riot survivors; instead what remains is the old political habit of speaking in symbolisms and making empty promises, with little success in rehabilitating the survivors of the North-East Delhi riots.
Yash Kumbhat is a third-year student at Harvard College and full-time volunteer at Neev – a foundation for pro-bono legal aid assisting riot survivors in their fight for fair compensation. Eklavya Vasudev is a lawyer and co-founder of Neev.