NEW DELHI: Riot police patrolled the streets of India’s capital on Wednesday and the city’s leader called for a curfew following battles between Hindus and Muslims that claimed at least 20 lives.
The two days of unrest — which has seen clashes between mobs armed with swords and guns — is the worst sectarian violence seen in Delhi in decades.
The clashes come amid worsening religious tensions following a citizenship law that critics say is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.
Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, called Wednesday for the army to be deployed and for a curfew to be imposed over flashpoint northeastern districts.
“Police, despite all its efforts, (are) unable to control the situation and instill confidence,” Kejriwal tweeted on Wednesday morning.
“Army (should) be called in and curfew imposed.”
The clashes began on Monday between people supporting and opposing the citizenship law, then descended into pitched battles between the mobs.
Twenty people died and nearly 200 others were wounded in the first two days of violence, the director of the hospital where people were taken, told AFP on Wednesday.
Sixty people had suffered gunshot wounds, according to the director, Sunil Kumar.
The area is home to mostly poorer economic migrants living in many shanty neighborhoods, and some fled on Wednesday ahead of more expected clashes.
“People are killing (each other). Bullets are being fired here,” a tailor in the Jaffrabad area told AFP, adding that he was returning home to his village in northern Uttar Pradesh state.
“There is no work... It is better to leave than to stick around here. Why would we want to die here?“
On Wednesday morning AFP saw people cleaning out the blackened and trashed interior of a mosque in the Ashok Nagar area burned out during the violence.
A video circulated on social media and verified by AFP showed men ripping off the muezzin’s loudspeaker on top of the mosque’s minaret and placing a Hindu religious flag and an Indian flag.
The new citizenship law has raised worries abroad that Modi wants to remold secular India into a Hindu nation while marginalizing the country’s 200 million Muslims, a claim he denies.
The law expedites the citizenship applications for persecuted minorities from India’s three Muslim-majority neighboring countries, but not if they are Muslim.
The flare-up in violence occurred as US President Donald Trump visited India and held talks with Modi in Delhi on Tuesday.
But Trump left as scheduled on Tuesday and his visit was not visibly interrupted by the violence.
Curfew call in Indian capital after 20 die in sectarian clashes
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Curfew call in Indian capital after 20 die in sectarian clashes
- Clashes began on Monday between people supporting and opposing the citizenship law
- Unrest is the worst sectarian violence seen in Delhi in decades
Macron announces new Ukraine ‘coalition’ summit in Paris on March 27
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SEOUL: North Korea on Thursday conducted a test fire of its latest anti-aircraft missile system in a drill watched by leader Kim Jong Un, Pyongyang’s state media reported.
The launch proved the system’s “combat fast response,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said, and came just over a week after South Korea began a major annual joint military drill with the United States.
M23 group seizes key town in eastern DR Congo
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GOMA: Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have entered the center of the eastern Congo town of Walikale, a local activist and an M23 source said on Thursday, expanding the insurgents’ presence deep into the Congolese interior despite renewed calls for a ceasefire.
Their entry into Walikale, an area rich in minerals including tin, followed fighting on Wednesday with the Democratic Republic of Congo’s army and allied militias on the outskirts of the town.
The town’s capture would leave the rebels, who took eastern Congo’s two largest cities earlier this year, in control of a road linking four eastern Congo provinces and within 400 km of Kisangani, the country’s fourth-biggest city.
“The rebels are now visible in the city’s center,” said Fiston Misona, a civil society activist in Walikale.
“There are at least seven people wounded who are at the general hospital.”
An M23 source said the rebels were in complete control of the town.
A spokesperson for Congo’s army did not respond to requests for comment about the situation in Walikale.
The rebels’ move on Walikale, a town of about 15,000 people, came despite calls on Tuesday by Congo President Felix Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame for an immediate ceasefire after their first direct talks since M23 stepped up its offensive in January.
The conflict, rooted in the fallout from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and competition for mineral riches, has quickly become eastern Congo’s worst conflict since a 1998-2003 war that drew in multiple neighboring countries.
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Rwanda has denied backing M23 and says its military has been acting in self-defense against Congo’s army and a militia founded by some of the perpetrators of the genocide.
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Burgum said the agency plans to reopen the 82 percent of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve that is available for leasing for development and reopen the 1.56-million-acre Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing.
He also said the administration would revoke restrictions on land along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Corridor and Dalton Highway north of the Yukon River and convey the land to the State of Alaska, which would pave the way forward for the proposed Ambler Road and the Alaska Liquified Natural Gas Pipeline project.
“It’s time for the US to embrace Alaska’s abundant and largely untapped resources as a pathway to prosperity for the Nation, including Alaskans,” said Burgum.
Drilling in Alaska’s pristine Arctic refuge has long been a source of friction between Alaska lawmakers and tribal corporations seeking to open more acres to drilling to spur economic growth, and Democratic presidential administrations that sought to preserve the local ecosystem and wildlife.
A January 8 lease auction that had been mandated by Congress held under the Biden administration’s Interior Department received no bids from energy companies.
The Biden administration last year rejected the Ambler Road Project, a proposed 211-mile road that would connect to a rare earths mining district.
Alaska’s Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy and the state’s congressional delegation have pushed for a reversal of Biden’s Alaska resource development policies.
The oil industry has signalled it would be hesitant to rush into Alaska given its high risk and the possibility of a political pendulum swing in four years that could put Alaska off limits again.
