Comment by Riaz Haq on January 3, 2020 at 7:47pm

NY Times on Indian Police Violence in Nagina, the birthplace of my mother

#India #Police Are Accused of Abusing #Muslims. Cops in small town of Nagina in #Bijnor district chased #Muslim teenagers into an empty house. They grabbed them and took them to a makeshift jail. And then they tortured them. #CAAProtests #Modi #Hindutva https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/world/asia/india-protests-police...

In Uttar Pradesh, the northern Indian state where Nagina is and the one with the most Muslim residents, the rioting has been among the most intense, and the violent backlash from the police has been the most deadly and troubling.

According to accounts by the detained boys in Nagina, along with family members and other officials in their town who spoke to them immediately after they were released, police officers over the course of 30 hours terrorized them and others who had been demonstrating on Dec. 20.

Police officials in the town deny that any abuse happened, or that minors had been detained at all around that time.

According to two of the boys, the officers laughed during beatings, saying, “You will die in this prison.”

“They were so scared that hardly anyone could speak,” said Khalil-ur-Rehman, a municipal officer in Nagina who met the children at a police station as soon as they were released on Dec. 22. “How do you justify detaining minors, let alone beating them black and blue?”

In an audio recording that some residents and officials say features the voice of Sanjeev Tyagi, the superintendent of police in the Bijnor district, which includes Nagina, a man orders police officers to “break the arms and legs of those throwing stones at police stations.”

“Go and fix them,” he said.

Mr. Tyagi looked surprised and a bit disturbed when asked, during an interview with The New York Times, about this recording. He declined to say whether his was the voice on the recording, which one officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, said had been radioed out to the police force. Since then it has been widely shared on social media.

After India’s Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act on Dec. 11, hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the streets in many cities across the country to oppose the law, which favors every major South Asian faith over Islam.

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