NEW DELHI: An Indian court on Thursday jailed a man for five years in the first conviction over religious riots in New Delhi in 2020, when more than 50 people, most of them Muslims, were killed.
The riots, the worst such violence in the capital in decades, followed months of protests against a citizenship law that critics say discriminates against the Muslim minority in the mostly Hindu country.
Prosecutors and witnesses said Dinesh Yadav was part of a mob of up to 200 mostly Hindu rioters who vandalized and set fire to the house of a woman named Manori, New Delhi’s Karkardooma Court heard last month.
Yadav’s lawyer, Shikha Garg, said that apart from the jail term, the court on Thursday also ordered him to pay a fine of 12,000 rupees ($161).
“We will file an appeal before a higher court,” Garg told Reuters.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration, which draws its support mainly from the majority community, changed the citizenship law in 2019 to expedite citizenship for persecuted Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who arrived in India before Dec. 31, 2014, from Muslim-majority Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Many Muslims in India have opposed the exclusion of their community. There are an estimated 200 million Muslims in India out of a population of 1.35 billion — the biggest Muslim minority in the world.
