The 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots were religious clashes between the Hindus and Muslims in the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, India. A total of 62 died in the clashes, 42 of whom were Muslims, and 20 Hindu. More than 50,000 people were displaced.
The inciting incident was the killing of a Muslim man by two Hindu cousins, Gaurav and Sachin Singh, on 27 August in the village of Kawal; sources describe the motive as arising from either a traffic altercation or sexual harassment of one of the cousins' relatives. A Muslim mob killed the cousins as they tried to flee. Violence escalated over the following week, fueled in part by a perception that local police were reluctant to apprehend the cousins' killers. On 7 September, a mahapanchayat assembly was called, and was attended by over 100,000 people and politicians from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Bharatiya Kisan Union, and the Congress Party; police described the rhetoric at the assembly as inflammatory. Widespread rioting broke out the following day, and the army was brought in to attempt to restore order and to evacuate Muslims to Muslim-majority villages. By 17 September, the curfew was lifted from all riot affected areas and the army was withdrawn. The refugee crisis created by the riots persisted for years afterward.
The riot was described as "the worst violence in Uttar Pradesh in recent history", and was the first time in 20 years the army was deployed in the state. 97 legal cases were launched involving accusations against more than 1,000 people, most of whom were acquitted over the next decade; seven were convicted of the murder of the Singh cousins. The Supreme Court of India, while hearing petitions in relation to the riots, held the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party guilty prima facie of negligence in preventing the violence and ordered it to immediately arrest all those accused irrespective of their political affiliation. The Court also blamed the Central government for its failure to provide intelligence inputs to the Samajwadi Party-governed state government in time to help sound alerts. In 2021, a local court allowed the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government to withdraw a case of inciting violence against 12 BJP leaders involved in the riots.
In 2022 Vikram Singh Saini, a BJP Member of the Legislative Assembly, and 11 others were sentenced to two years' imprisonment by a special court that convicted them of rioting and other offences.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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