Danish
Marketing Manager, Relief Volunteer North East Delhi
MY WORK IS MY RELIGION
“I belong to Bijnor, Western U.P. As a family, we struggled a lot in the beginning, living in East Delhi beyond Yamuna (“Jamna paar”). I’m from a lower middle class family and have studied in a government school. After college, I learnt sales and marketing, and worked at Ranbaxy and Dr Reddys. When the riots happened in February, I was working as a sales manager in a ‘cosmo derma company’, covering North-East Delhi. As the violence started, my family shifted to Ghaziabad to stay with relatives. I came back to Gokulpuri in the area on the 24th, and saw petrol pumps on fire, the entire market in flames, children crying on the streets. I saw a house being burnt by people with lathis. As I took out my phone, they asked me not to record a video of their acts. They thought I was Hindu, because of my face. My wife and my 3 year old child kept crying on the phone, asking me to come back home.The first few nights of violence, we were scared, we couldn’t sleep. There were slogans of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ echoing through the streets. ‘Darr ka manzar tha’ (There was fear everywhere). When we shifted back home, there was an eerie silence, broken buildings, burnt shops and mounds of debris strewn across the streets.“
The sight of families sleeping in a temporary shelter in Chaman Park made Danish realise just how small his own problems were.
“Families were staying in halls. There were children with burnt hands, people with broken heads, dirty clothes, no slippers, they were hungry and traumatised. Most people were being transferred to the Eidgah relief camp. Many were scared to go to doctors because they feared they’d be blamed for the riots. We had to do something ! We started with whatever we had at home, clothes, blankets and later started giving medical aid. We wanted to comfort them. While taking people to the hospital we were scared we’d be stopped by the police as Section 144 was imposed. Hygiene was a big issue, people had scabies, infections, itchiness in the camps. While most of the doctors who came were general physicians, we needed gynaecologists for women who were pregnant or lactating. We needed to provide correct and safe treatment. People migrating from one camp to another would often fall ill. And the Eidgah camp had no doctors on site after 2 am at night. We converted our van into an ambulance. There was a pregnant woman in the camp, Ayesha ( name changed) who was severely anaemic and needed to get an ultrasound. Hospitals didn't even admit her. None of her family members, except her young daughter, accompanied her. After trying a few hospitals, we finally managed to get her admitted to Al-Shifa hospital in Shaheen Bagh. She had a normal, healthy delivery there.”
He saw how people in the camps were feeling hopeless and uncertain about their future. They felt trapped by their dependency on state support for relief and survival. The pandemic made it worse. And the Eidgah camp, home to more than 600 riot victims, was cleared out.
“Everybody was doing their own promotion, taking videos at the camps. Nobody was looking at the real problems, what these people had actually gone through. Even within Mustafabad, there were close to 6 lakh people, many of whom were poor migrants, who had no roof over their heads and didn’t have money to even buy a ticket to go back to their native homes. There was a lot of confusion and the lockdown just added to it. With hardly any cross checking, some people got help four times and some not even once. Men would push their women into the relief queues. And elderly and pregnant victims could not stand in these queues! We did a ‘gully to gully’ ( lane to lane) survey of the area, and made lists of families, children so that we could deliver the right amount of cooked food packets at their doorsteps. We noticed that used and dirty clothes would often come as donations to the camps and would get thrown on the road in piles to be picked up by people. These clothes were causing fungal infections. So we bought a second hand washing machine, made bundles out of these clothes and gave them to riot victims in the camps to wash in the machine. We gave them 10-15 Rs per piece for washing. This way, they gained confidence and the skin diseases also went down.”
Danish was happy that people supported the initiative. This motivated them to do more things in the community.
“Eidgah camp often became like a market. ‘ Show us your burnt house in Shiv Vihar, show FIR and get your money’. The root cause of the problem wasn’t being reached. We had a little money saved but we wanted to use it well. We focussed on providing rations, taking care of people’s house-rent and restarting the work they were doing before the riots. We would get people to distribute rations with us. Farhana distributed milk to pregnant mothers, and Irfan’s shop was used as the local kirana shop for relief provisions. We made sure everyone went to their shops. They had work again and could start saving. A medical lab worker collected the victims’ blood for free, a carpenter helped in rebuilding destroyed homes and a barber gave free hair cuts. People started becoming stable in their own areas of work. We wanted them to become self employed. We wanted to let them know that even if it was hard, it was possible for them to take care of themselves and each other.”
Danish was troubled to see that Muslim communities living in these areas were being targeted and were being wrongly framed by the police in false cases.
“People had already faced a lot of trauma. Firoz’s body was found after 14 days. Jamaal bhai, who had been hit by a rod on the head, died in three days. Sameer was hit by a bullet, and he’s fully paralysed because of a spinal cord injury. People’s IDs were checked and they were killed for being Muslims. Muslim victims were scared that the police was biased, and wouldn’t help them. What did the fear do to their mental health? We know so many people whose families are being chased even now in false cases. They don't stop following you even after the riots. Yakub bhai’s entire tyre shop in Karawal Nagar was looted and burned. But he’s facing charges because his name and video came in a video that someone made. Some people in the video who were arrested, are now roaming free in the open. He went to file an FIR but the police refused to register his complaint. We had to make people feel safe, because they had no faith in the police and the state and that’s why we started a counselling group in Babu Nagar. Kids could be heard saying ye hindu ne kiya, yeh muslim ne kiya’ (Hindu did this, Muslim did this!) We are sowing seeds of hatred even in kids now. We needed to address the hatred people were feeling.”
Danish was mostly unemployed during his volunteering days, and drove a taxi to run the house.
“Once I offered a ride to a ‘baba’ (hermit) in my taxi. Throughout the ride, he spoke about how muslims are doing ‘bad’ things. When the ride ended, he thanked me and called me ‘Krishna’s avatar’ ( a manifestation of the Hindu God Krishna). Then he asked me my name. I told him my full name because I wanted him to take away a different image of a Muslim. That people can help without any reason to help.”
From providing vegetables to riot victims, supporting them in re-starting their small businesses, and starting a small school in a rented building for children in riot stricken areas, free of cost, Danish has been tirelessly volunteering, raising money, awareness and helping organisations connect to people at the ground, in the aftermath of the February 2020 pogrom. He gave up his job in pharmaceuticals around March 2020 but little did he know that his wife would be diagnosed with rectum cancer this year.
If you would like to support Danish and the family, in cancer treatments and required finances, please reach out to Radhika Kannan at brihada.radhika@gmail.com.
Interviewed by Nida Ansari
Collage by Shreya Roy Chowdhury and Pooja Dhingra; Embroidery on Collage by Singhleton