Death toll rises to 32 from riots in New Delhi

NEW DELHI: The death toll in ongoing protests against the citizenship amendment law (CAA) on Thursday jumped to 32 and more than 200 people have been injured.

According to the Indian media, scores of people have been moved to various medical facilities in critical condition.  Thousands of riot police and paramilitaries patrolled the affected northeast fringes of the Indian capital of 20 million people, preventing any major eruptions.

Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, a political opponent, called for the army to be deployed and for a curfew to be imposed.

Delhi Police spokesman Mandeep Singh Randhawa told reporters 106 people had been arrested. The US embassy issued a travel warning advising citizens to exercise caution.

Accusations run amuck that Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are undermining India’s secular traditions.

Monday’s clashes were among the worst seen in New Delhi since the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) began in early December.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday urged the international community to ‘act now’ on the violence against 200 million Muslims in India, ARY News reported.

PM Imran Khan in a post on Twitter said: “As I had predicted in my address to UN GA last year, once the genie is out of the bottle the bloodshed will get worse. IOJK was the beginning. Now 200 million Muslims in India are being targeted. The world community must act now”.

“Today in India we are seeing the Nazi-inspired RSS ideology take over a nuclear-armed state of over a billion people. Whenever a racist ideology based on hatred takes over, it leads to bloodshed,” he wrote further in a Tweet