<![CDATA[Amid India's violent crackdown on citizenship law protests, a family seeks answers after son's death]>

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.

That is a notoriously difficult task for many of the country's marginalised communities. An update of the NRC in the state of Assam last year saw 2 million people left off the list. Many were Muslim.

Over the past week there have been three shootings aimed at protesters or students in Muslim areas of New Delhi. At least one of the gunmen was said to have clear Hindu nationalist leanings, Reuters reported.

Women in New Delhi participate in a January 18 protest against a new citizenship law that opponents say threatens India's secular identity. Photo: AP

But the incidents have come after far more brutal mass acts of violence as part of a police crackdown on Muslim quarters and universities in the country since the unrest began. At least 25 people have been killed, with most of the violence taking place in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where Meerut is located. The deadliest day of violence was December 20 " when Ansari was killed.

Ansari's family says he was shot on his way home after the food stall he ran was closed by police because of the unrest.

"We got a call around 4:15pm that our brother got shot. There was an atmosphere of terror," Salahuddin said. "We couldn't even go out to see if he was alive or dead. Around 10pm someone showed us a video which verified my brother's death."

Other videos that circulated online in the aftermath of the violence in Meerut showed police opening fire on civilians with bullets and tear gas. Eyewitness accounts also back up that version of events.

Police acknowledge that five people were killed in the city on December 20, but they deny any role in the killings, saying they only fired in the air to control the crowds. They allege the deaths were caused by protesters with guns.

But activists say the broader crackdown on Muslim enclaves in Uttar Pradesh has been so brutal it is hard to see it as anything other than a targeted campaign. While storming Aligarh Muslim University on December 15, police reportedly used stun grenades " weaponry usually only deployed during wars. Elsewhere in the state, police have used more bullets and tear gas, beaten children and ransacked homes.

"In Uttar Pradesh the police are not abiding by the law," said Ali Zaidi, a Supreme Court lawyer representing Ansari's family. "The police are now abiding by the law of the Chief Minister. That is the only law the police use."

Aleem's brother Mohammad Salahuddin (centre), his father Habib (left), and another brother at their family home in Meerut. Photo: Ashish Malhotra

The Chief Minister in question is Yogi Adityanath, a firebrand right-wing Hindu priest, who Modi installed as leader of the state in 2017. Many Muslims in Uttar Pradesh feel the recent crackdown is only the latest example of Adityanath's government targeting the community since coming to power. Adityanath is known for his inflammatory religious rhetoric, and has been previously charged for inciting deadly riots.

In the wake of Ansari's death, Salahuddin says the family faced harassment by authorities who made identifying his brother and performing last rites difficult. According to The Indian Express newspaper, police claimed Ansari's death was not linked to the unrest.

"They kept sending me all over the place in search of my brother's body," Salahuddin said. "They just wanted to harass us and in that state, with the news of my brother's death in my mind, I just didn't know what to do. I was losing my mind. I hadn't eaten anything, not slept due to all the running around. I was losing my voice."

At one stage, authorities suggested Ansari's body had mistakenly been sent to Delhi, almost 100 kilometres away. Even when the body was finally found in Meerut, Salahuddin says he was subjected to further indignities.

Police officials "didn't let us bury our brother in our own [local] graveyard," he said. "They told us to go and bury it in some other graveyard. Why were the police behaving badly to us?"

For six weeks after that, Ansari's family awaited the postmortem report, without which they could not file a police report. According to a tribunal of activists, almost a month after the December 20 violence, only three families in Uttar Pradesh had received postmortem reports about their loved ones. The trend has led to accusations that the delay is a state tactic to stall proper investigations into the deaths.

"No rules were followed to do the postmortem," said Zaidi, the lawyer for Ansari's family. "No panel of doctors. Only a single doctor did the postmortem."

Zaidi said the police delayed releasing the postmortem "so that we could not launch a [police] report " so that we could not go to court."

The family is planning to lodge a police report in the coming week, the lawyer said.

Police officials, however, have denied the allegations.

"People are spreading false rumours about the delays in postmortem reports. There is no time frame within which the report has to be given," said Prashant Kumar, a senior police officer in Meerut.

"The victim's family has to ask [police officials] for the postmortem report to be given and pay the required amount to the police," he said. "We have given out the reports when asked. There hasn't been any delay in that."

Back in the Ansari household, Salahuddin says the family is not very political, and didn't even know much about the CAA when his brother was killed. Still, Salahuddin says he increasingly feels Muslims in India have been under attack since Modi came to power with his Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014.

The memories of his 85-year-old father, Habib, go back further " to the 1947 partition of India that led to the establishment of Pakistan as a Muslim state.

"In 1947 my village had 500-600 Muslim families. Out of that only three went" to Pakistan, he said, adding that the rest stayed in India because they saw it as their home.

"The country was so much better, but I don't know what has happened to it now."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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