Gurugram: Ten days after communal violence broke out in Haryana following a religious procession in the state’s Nuh district, police appear to have a new challenge — battling rumours related to the violence.
On 31 July, tensions between Hindus and Muslims broke out in Nuh after a religious procession organised by Hindutva group Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and its women’s wing Matru Shakti Durga Vahini. Nuh is a Muslim-majority district in Haryana’s Mewat region.
Stone-pelting and arson followed, and the violence eventually spread to neighbouring Nagina and Ferozepur Jhirka towns, and spilled over to Gurugram. Six people, including two home guards and an imam of a mosque, have been killed in the various incidents of violence that were reported over two days.
Since then, the state police has an another task, in addition to maintaining peace and conducting investigations into the violence — separating fact from fiction.
A report in Dainik Jagran, for instance, claimed that a mob vandalised Nuh’s Alwar Hospital and “attacked Hindus” there on 31 July. While there was visible evidence of the attack at the hospital when ThePrint visited Tuesday, eyewitnesses were unclear about the specifics of the incident, neither supporting nor denying the alleged targeted attack on Hindus.
An officer at Nuh City Police Station told ThePrint that no FIR was registered about the alleged attack on the Alwar Hospital.
A second report, by a channel called Leading Bharat TV, claimed that some women who were stranded at Nuh’s Nalhad Shiv temple when the violence began had been dragged by rioters to a nearby field and raped.
The report has been flagged as a rumour on social media. In a tweet on 5 August, senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai asked Haryana Police and Nuh superintendent of police to take action in the matter.
Will @police_haryana and Nuh SP act against this fake news? Official version denying this has already been given. Now what action will be taken to stop this deliberate and very dangerous attempt to incite people ? Will the ‘newly minted’ twitter act?? Here is the official denial:… https://t.co/uoHZdBw1e9
— Rajdeep Sardesai (@sardesairajdeep) August 5, 2023
Haryana additional director general of police (ADGP,Law and Order) Mamta Singh and VHP International joint general secretary Surender Jain too have refuted the allegations of rape of women stranded at the Nalhad Shiv temple, from where VHP’s ‘Braj Mandal Yatra’ began that day.
Singh, who was among the first to reach the temple when reports of over 3,000 devotees being stranded there first broke, told ThePrint that no such incident had occurred.
In a statement issued Wednesday, Nuh deputy commissioner (DC) Dhirendra Khadgata made an appeal to public to not pay heed to rumours. The DC also said that police has registered 11 FIRs for alleged spreading of rumours related to the violence.
Both news organisations have told ThePrint in separate statements that they stood by their reportage.
Also Read: Nuh violence got India’s attention, but Mewat wasn’t always communal
Reports and denials
In its 4 August report, Dainik Jagran claimed that a mob had attacked Alwar Hospital in Nuh, and beaten up the hospital’s Hindu staff and patients, including a doctor and a pregnant woman.
The entire incident was caught on security cameras in the hospital, the report went on to claim, adding that two people identified as Nasir and Anjum (identified only by single names in the report) were arrested in connection with the attack.
A clipping of the news item was tweeted on 4 August on the microblogging platform ‘X’ — formerly known as Twitter — by a user who goes by the name Bala and whose handle, @erbmjha, counts Prime Minister Narendra Modi as one of its 182000 followers. The tweet, which had 2,841 retweets and 4,452 likes, has now been deleted. ThePrint has a screenshot of it.
When ThePrint visited the hospital this week, it bore visible signs of the attack — such as broken glass panes. New CCTV cameras had replaced the ones allegedly broken by the mob and a sense of fear seemed palpable in the hospital’s patient-less corridors.
A hospital employee claimed she saw a mob enter and break the windows in the hospital’s gallery. “But I didn’t see much [else]. I was too scared so I ran inside,” she told ThePrint.
Asked if she saw the mob harass any patients, she said: “I don’t think so. But I didn’t see anything as I hid in a room.” She further added: “Patients don’t want to come here anymore”.
When ThePrint contacted him about the news item, Ajay Kumar, the in-charge of the hospital, appeared evasive, even angry.
“The media can publish whatever nonsense they want to publish,” he said abruptly before disconnecting the call.
But Inspector Hukam Singh, the station house officer (SHO) at Nuh City Police Station, told ThePrint that no FIR had been registered about the alleged attack.
“We have neither received any complaint from the hospital owners, nor have we registered any FIR with regard to any attack on the hospital you have mentioned,” he told ThePrint Wednesday. “Now, since you have brought this to our notice, we will send our men there to find out what exactly happened there on 31 July”.
The second report, also tweeted by the same handle, @erbmjha, on 5 August, purportedly showed clothes lying on the road leading to the Nalhad temple. The report quotes witnesses to claim that a mob dragged some women to the fields nearby to rape them and that some remain missing.
Our sad guesses appear to be right. Many Hindu individuals are still missing and now near the hills close to temple, torn clothes of women have been discovered.
Several women have spoken on camera about how jihadis abducted young girls.
What have they done to innocent girls? pic.twitter.com/KitN0sRNwB
— BALA (@erbmjha) August 5, 2023
In their statements, both news organisations said they stand by their report.
Pradeep Shukla, the resident editor of Dainik Jagran for the Delhi–NCR region said the report had been filed after “visiting the hospital, speaking to the patients, hospital staff and the doctor”.
“There is no denying the fact that the hospital was attacked during the 31 July violence at Nuh,” he said. “Now, if the doctor has chosen to not report the case to the police, or the police has not registered an FIR in connection with the incident, we can’t do anything.”
He, however, gave no clear response to the alleged targeted attacks on Hindus, as mentioned in the report. But Satyendra Singh, the reporter who wrote the report, told ThePrint that he had heard about the alleged targeted attacks from the staff at the hospital.
Likewise, Anurag Chadha, director and chairman of Leading Bharat TV, said his channel had “shown visuals from the ground”.
“Whatever we have shown on our channel is a ground report by our journalists. They have shown visuals of whatever they noticed and we have shown the original bytes of people our team met on the ground.”
When asked about ADGP Singh refuting allegations of rapes or molestations of women stranded at the temple as “rumours”, Chadha said that the police can say whatever they want but his channel has shown what people from the area said on camera.
ADGP Singh has dismissed the channel’s claims as “efforts to disturb the communal harmony in the area”.
Reports of rape of women in #NuhViolence #HaryanaMewatViolence #Haryanaviolence #NuhStonePelting are fake please don't believe and spread rumors. ADGP @police_haryana Mamta Singh and @DGPHaryana deny such incident. Please remove fake videos. Let's not make #Haryana #MANIPUR pic.twitter.com/49za65NcMQ
— Sumedha Sharma (@sumedhasharma86) August 5, 2023
“Today, a narrative is gaining currency on social media that when the devotees were trapped in Nalhad Shiv temple, some women devotees were raped. Some clothes are being shown on social media to prove their point,” she told ANI Sunday. “I want to tell you that all these narratives are incorrect and rumours. I’m able to say this with authority because I was there in the Shiv temple on the day of violence. There was no such incident.”
VHP International joint general secretary Surender Jain, who had flagged off the religious procession from the Nalhad Shiv temple on 31 July, also dismissed claims of rape.
“All these reports are absolutely false. Also, we sent our people to each and every household from where devotees had come to Nuh for the yatra on 31 July. Initially, four men were reported as missing. However, they also reached home, as they were stuck somewhere. No woman is missing as all those who came for the Yatra have reached home safely,” Jain told ThePrint.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)