NEW DELHI: The beating and subsequent death in New Delhi of a university student from India’s remote northeast has sparked a furious outcry against racism and criticism of police in the Indian capital.
Several hundred people protested outside a Delhi police station Saturday, shouting demands for justice against what they called a hate crime. The capital’s newly elected chief minister asked that a magistrate investigate the incident as well as the police response.
Police detained two shopkeepers and launched a murder investigation Friday night, after being criticized for doing little following Wednesday’s altercation.
“We are questioning several people in the case,” said Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat.
Officials said 20-year-old Nido Tania had been on vacation from his studies in Jalandhar, Punjab, when he was beaten by New Delhi shopkeepers who had ridiculed his appearance. Many indigenous people from India’s northeast, some ethnically closer to people in Myanmar and China, often say they encounter racism and discrimination in the rest of India.
Tania died in his bed on Thursday morning. An autopsy was being conducted to determine a cause of death.
Tania was the son of a member of the Arunachal Pradesh state assembly from the nationally ruling Congress Party. The Home Ministry also asked police for a detailed report.
Hundreds of students held demonstrations in front of a police station and near the shop where Tania was beaten in the south Delhi neighborhood of Lajpat Nagar. They carried placards with slogans including “Hang the culprits,” and “Why are we treated like outsiders?“
“This was a racist hate crime,” said Albina Subba, an advertising writer originally from the northeast Himalayan town of Darjeeling. “Our community is often targeted like this. ... We look different, so it’s easy for people to see we’re not from Delhi.”
She added: “We have little faith in the Delhi police, but this time we want them to take action.”
A Facebook page titled “Justice for Nido Tania” had received support from more than 16,700 people by Saturday afternoon.
“There is no place for elements trying to spread hatred against people belonging to any particular part of the country,” Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said in a statement.
Kejriwal’s upstart Aam Aadmi Party, or Common Man’s Party, said that the brazenness of the public beating proved that the city’s law enforcement was failing its citizens. The party has been lambasting Delhi police force, which reports to the federal government, since almost immediately after last month’s election victory.
Outcry against racism in Delhi after student’s death
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It is almost as if the next Indian elections are going to be based on riot vs. riot. Like the 1984 riots linked to the Congress will be pitted against the BJP stigma of involvement in the Godhra riots of 2002 and the trading of insults will rise to a piercing crescendo.
It is like my daddy is bigger than your daddy has become the lief motif for the next power era. Now that the scab has spitefully been lifted off the two terrible incidents of mob violence in India’s modern history what possible comfort has it brought us to see protests by the affected communities once again? It has sparked rage, protest, more violence and opened up the vents again. In what way has all this retrospection and that averagely dreary Rahul Gandhi interview (which is the cherry on the irresponsible TV media onslaught on the national intelligence) helped India move on? In fact, these interviews are incitements to rioting and should be legally open to action. To my mind this is an abuse of the freedom of the press. Now we have Sikhs getting angry, Muslims showing their rage, Hindus finding a misplaced messiah in Modi and thousands of bewildered Kejriwal supporters wondering what to do with having got what they wished for.
Why do we hurt ourselves? When the search for truth becomes maliciously self-destructive and concern masquerades as deliberate provocation you are only playing with people’s feelings and strumming their fate.
And what is so important about the words of Rahul Gandhi? He is not even standing for election, let him have his opinion and if you really look at it, there was nothing remarkably original about his saying that some Congress folks could have been involved in the 1984 madness. If he had said no there would have been a volley of accusations that he was covering up.
Stop this trample into the past. You are just bruising people who have already been hurt and lost loved ones and why make them go through the pain again. With just about 90 days to go for the general elections, the Congress and the BJP cannot go beyond the “riot” angle and that augurs ill for the country.
Whose riot is going to resonate the most? Is this what is going to decide how the vote goes?
In fact, never have we been so shorn of leadership, so completely devoid of a blueprint for the future and so dumb as to let TV anchors take over our lives. The Congress and the BJP, ironically, are beginning to coalesce into twins, so alike are they in their mirror images. Both have one “uh oh” leader. Both are scared of the anarchist. Both have lost their way. Both are falling back on transparent vote banks and both are shot ducks in the water.
Rahul has exhausted all his rhetoric. Modi cannot find his script except to wave his hand and that sheen he had gained, as a person who would deliver economically seems to be tarnishing. Kejriwal, the giant killer has no more stones in his catapult and has stretched his personal credibility to breaking point. You just cannot take him or his Cabinet seriously not when it is predicated to being anarchist and is spinning in its own cul-de-sac, unsure which road to turn into.
But instead of taking stock of their common enemies like poverty, injustice, unemployment and hunger they are all putting band-aids on gaping wounds. Indeed, the sun is down and the night is riding in.
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