Amid India’s violent crackdown on citizenship law protests, a family seeks answers after son’s death

The relatives of a Muslim man shot in the head during protests in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut has alleged a cover-up by police

Officials have denied the charge, even as activists see the beginnings of a targeted campaign by police against Muslims protesting the law

Reading Time:4 minutes

Aleem Ansari’s 85-year-old father, Habib, holds a photo of his slain son. Photo: Ashish Malhotra

Published: 10:30am, 9 Feb 2020Updated: 10:39am, 9 Feb 2020

It took more than a month after Aleem Ansari was killed in the Indian city of Meerut for his family to get the postmortem report. When they finally did, they weren’t surprised by the conclusion: a bullet wound to the 24-year-old’s head.

But what they do dispute is the account by local police that Ansari, a Muslim, was shot by a violent protester on December 20 amid unrest following passage of a controversial citizenship law.

“I don’t have an iota of belief in that,” said his older brother, Mohammad Salahuddin. “They are saying that to cover up what they did.”

Protests against India’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) have gripped the country since the law was passed on December 11. Critics of the CAA say it is anti-Muslim because it provides a fast track to citizenship for Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities from India’s neighbouring countries but leaves out Muslims.

The law has been championed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government and is seen as particularly worrying in the context of the potential roll-out of a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which would require all Indians to prove their citizenship with documentation.