By Betwa Sharma
Delhi: “It could happen to any Muslim family,” Afreen Fatima, then 24 years old, told us, 12 hours before her nightmare was realised.
The government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh accused her father of masterminding a riot in Allahabad, detained her mother and sister, declared their home illegal, and demolished it on 12 June 2020 in a feverish spectacle beamed on new channels.
Afterwards, reporters picked through the debris left by the bulldozer.
In the year that followed, the State slapped baseless case after case and a preventive detention order against her father, Javed Mohammad, a businessman and a prominent social activist in the city who had been critical of the BJP amid rising Islamophobia, but also worked well with the local administration over local matters concerning Muslims.
“A dehumanising year,” is how Fatima described it to us.
A linguistics graduate of Aligarh Muslim University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, she was then a fiery activist, far more outspoken about the plight of Muslims under the BJP than her mild-mannered father. But as efforts shifted to securing his release from jail, she seemingly stepped back from the frontlines.
When Mohammad was released after securing bail in all eight cases against him after 21 months in jail, he told us, “Is it not the limit? First, they put five cases, then the NSA, then three more, then the Gangster Act, then the Arms Act. It is only because of God’s mercy that I have come out. This is injustice and an atrocity.”
Over three and a half years after authorities arrested him and demolished his family home, citing illegal construction, no formal charges have been filed against the alleged mastermind of the UP riots triggered by a BJP leader’s controversial remarks about the Prophet Mohammad.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
