Thread by @MnshaP

"Mulle media banke aaye hai. Maaron salon ko. Media waale hai [Muslims have come here disguised as journalists. Beat them up!]"

@sighyush walked from Jaffrabad towards UP border last night & witnessed the madness that's taken over Delhi.
#DelhiViolence

newslaundry.com/2020/02/26/smo…

@sighyush At the Maujpur-Babarpur metro station, Hanuman Chalisa blared from speakers as men armed with sticks and rods stood by and chanted religious slogans. A senior CAPF officer, learning that we were from the media, told us to not meddle with this crowd. “Take the opposite road."

@sighyush In Babarpur, men of all ages congregated confidently outside bylanes, brandishing sticks and rods. Boys as young as 10, wielding rods, accompanied them. There were very few women.

@sighyush Often, a procession of armed men with covered faces chanting “Jai Shri Ram” would pass by, and men would shrink back to the footpaths and chant along.

@sighyush “The shop belonged to a Muslim, so it was destroyed,” a middle-aged man with vermillion on his forehead told me. “If the owner came, we would have killed him too. They’re doing this to Hindus in Jaffrabad, and we’re doing this here.”

@sighyush A few 100 metres before Gokulpuri, where the main road curved towards Yamuna Vihar, we encountered barricades and a dozen men lurking around them. These were Hindus who were afraid that Muslims from across the Shahdara drain would attack their colony. They carried rods and sticks

@sighyush “The police came here at 6 pm yesterday and left at 8 pm,” said one man, reeking of alcohol and visibly upset. “We need safety. If they [Muslims] come here and torch the cars and scooters, what will we do? We are protecting ourselves.”

@sighyush We skirted Gokulpuri, where Hindu residents had barricaded the colony’s entrance and men on guard looked on suspiciously at outsiders. Following the metro line, we reached the Loni border, where Delhi ends and Uttar Pradesh begins.

@sighyush As we talked to officers at the Loni Border police station, dense smoke rose from the area behind the station. We reached the spot and saw a raging fire inside a slum located right beside a drain. It was 10 pm.

@sighyush Slum-dwellers provided an account of what went down: dwellings belonging to Muslims had been torched. Muslim residents — about 20 of them — had left a day before, because residents in the surrounding Ganga Vihar and Johri Enclave, predominantly Hindus, had asked them to.

@sighyush The residents who talked to us were Dalits of the Mahavat caste. Their houses were spared but they were angry and upset. “The men wore masks and told us that we will not burn your houses because you are Hindus,” said one man who had tried to douse the flames.

@sighyush “We were torn. The Muslims are our neighbours and the arsonists were Hindus: how can we oppose either?”

@sighyush By 11 pm, huge waves of leaping fire had consumed the slum dwellings. Small, diminutive fires had taken over. No one knew where the Muslim residents had gone, not even their neighbours. Wherever they were, they had nothing to return to.