The Forgotten Widows of the Delhi Pogrom

Three Days That Remade Northeast Delhi

On 23 February 2020, communal violence erupted in Northeast Delhi and burned for three days. By the time it subsided, 53 people were dead, 18 mosques had been set alight, and homes, shops and schools across the district's working-class neighbourhoods had been reduced to ash.

Six years on, a documentary crew returned to the same lanes and found them unnervingly quiet, a silence that, as the film's narration puts it, cannot hide the screams that came before it. Behind that quiet are women whose husbands did not survive those three days: widows who watched the men they had built their lives around dragged from their homes and killed in the street, and who have spent the years since raising children alone, chasing court dates, and waiting for a state that has yet to answer for what happened.

Three of them agreed to speak on camera: Mallika, Nargis and Jahira. Their testimonies, and the wider reckoning the film sets alongside them, form the record that follows.

Mallika: “I Saw It With My Own Eyes”

Mallika lost her husband, Musharraf, on the night the violence reached her street. She recalls that the lane's main gate had been locked from outside by a Hindu neighbour she names as Sapna, trapping the family inside as a mob of more than 200 men, armed with iron rods, chains and swords, surged in on a rumour that a Muslim man was hiding there.

From her window, Mallika watched as the crowd found her husband. Musharraf was beaten with iron rods, she says, and his head was struck against a wall. “I saw it with my own eyes,” Mallika told Nous. When Musharraf collapsed, bleeding, he was dragged down a stairwell, set on fire while still alive, and his body was thrown into a drain.

Her children, she says, clung to the attackers' legs and begged for their father's life; they were kicked aside and warned they would be killed too if they did not move. Mallika later went searching among the dead and injured collected at a nearby hospital, where the bodies had been laid out faster than there was room for them, and identified her husband herself. “It was God's will,” she says now. Musharraf's death left their children without a father, and left Mallika running the household alone in a neighbourhood where she still recognises many of the people who stood by, or joined in, that night.

Nargis: A Pregnant Widow's Three-Day Search

Nargis was pregnant when her husband, Mursaleen, left for work on the morning of 21 February 2020. He never came back. As reports of rioting spread through the neighbourhood that afternoon, Nargis began calling him; the phone rang unanswered through the night and the next day, and by the third day had gone switched off entirely.

Relatives and in-laws searched in parallel, calling around the family's contacts with no success, until word came that the missing and the dead were being taken to the same hospital. There, after three days of searching, Nargis found her husband's body: shot in the abdomen, cut across the stomach with a sword, his lips slashed and his skull battered until his face was unrecognisable. She identified him only by the missing big toe on his right foot.

“All I have left in my life now is my children,” Nargis told Nous. Six years later she is still raising three of them alone in the narrow lanes she names as Shivhar, taking on small jobs to keep the household running. The grief has not receded with time, she says; it is her young daughter, Hija, who carries it most visibly, crying at night for a father she was too young ever to have known.

Jahira: Trapped on the Walk Home

Jahira describes a small but complete life before February 2020: a husband, four children, a home with little money but no shortage of affection. Her husband had come to visit her mother in the area and stayed through the worst of the rioting; when an evening lull convinced him the violence had passed, he set out for home. It hadn't passed. He called her along the way to say he was trapped, and the line cut before he could say more.

It took Jahira's family three days of searching relatives, friends and hospitals before they found him. His body, she says, was recovered caked in mud and debris, consistent, in the family's understanding, with having been pulled from a drain.

Jahira is left raising two sons and two daughters. Her eldest son now works to support the household, while she and her daughters manage what remains of it. She had never, before that year, stepped outside her home alone. “Whoever it happened to never forgets,” she told Nous. She now runs the household by herself, mother and, in her children's telling, father as well.

Six Years On, No One Has Been Held to Account

The film pairs these three testimonies with a broader accounting of what has, and has not, followed. An advocate interviewed in the documentary, who works on riot cases through APCR, describes a double crisis for women like Mallika, Nargis and Jahira: first an existential one, since in the communities they come from a married woman's social standing is bound to her husband's presence, and second a material one, as school fees, groceries and medical costs suddenly became a single widow's sole responsibility in households that were already poor before they lost an earner.

Extended family absorbed some of that burden, the advocate notes, but because the wider support network is itself poor, it could not sustain the families for long; within months of the pandemic's second wave, most had slid into serious financial crisis. One of the women describes working at a bangle-kiln, her hands scarred from the furnace, for roughly six thousand rupees a month with no paid leave, a single missed day costing her a third of her wage.

Court proceedings have moved just as slowly. One widow recounts being summoned to hearing after hearing and asked each time who her enemy was, a question she says she cannot answer, since she recognised no one in the mob that killed her husband. Her father-in-law had been attending the hearings on the family's behalf until his own death partway through the case; after that, with young children to care for, she found it increasingly hard to spend entire days in court for dates that produced no movement.

The advocate goes further, arguing that Delhi Police cannot be expected to conduct an impartial investigation into riots in which, he says, the force was itself implicated as a participant, and that its energy since has gone into cases such as FIR 59, prosecuting people it alleges were “falsely implicated,” rather than identifying the killers themselves. He draws a contrast with the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, whose survivors, he says, remain comparatively organised, documented and politically visible decades on; the 2020 riot victims, overwhelmingly poor and without an equivalent political constituency, have not had the same capacity to sustain their case in public memory, even as APCR alone says it is tracking roughly 2,700 riot-related cases, more than the organisation says it can adequately handle.

Some compensation has reached a handful of families, the film cites government payouts of roughly one lakh rupees, alongside support from a few NGOs, but for the women interviewed that has not amounted to justice. One widow, doubting the case will ever be resolved through the courts, has largely stopped expecting it from the state at all. “Only Allah will give us justice,” she says. One of the daughters interviewed in the film, speaking of the men who killed her father, wants something more concrete: that they be punished, and that she be allowed to see it happen.

Mallika, Nargis and Jahira are, in the film's own accounting, only three of at least twenty-one widows the violence of February 2020 created; the other eighteen did not agree to appear on camera. Six years after the mosques burned and the drains filled with bodies, the documentary argues, their cases remain where they began: unresolved, and waiting.