Alok Tiwari. Deepak Kumar. Dinesh Kumar. Ratan Lal. Naresh Kumar Saini. Vinod Kumar. Ankit Sharma. Sanjeet Thakur. Rahul Solanki. Rahul Thakur. Prem Singh. Veer Bhan. Nitin Kumar. Sonu. Dalbir Singh Negi.
These are fifteen names. Pause for a moment and ask yourself when you last heard them. In which case did they appear? Most of us cannot recall. Without a written list, even those who once knew them would forget. These are not abstract figures. They are among the Hindus who lost their lives in the 2020 Delhi riots. According to the Delhi Police chargesheet, the same document on which courts have repeatedly denied bail, Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam are among the alleged masterminds of those riots.
Now consider six more names: Umakant Makwana, Jasel Kumar Soni, Satish Vyas, Narendra Patel, Shailesh Panchal, and Lalita Ben Patel. These six were among the 59 people burned alive in the Godhra train carnage of 2002. Three further names follow: Ravi Kumar Khanna, DB Singh, and Uday Shankar—personnel linked to the Indian Air Force, murdered by Yasin Malik. A fourth name belongs in this list as well: Airman Azad Ahmed, a Muslim who became collateral damage in the same violence. These are only a handful among the countless Hindus who met untimely deaths across centuries of civilisational conflict.
Contrast this silence with the relentless attention given to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. Their latest bail rejection has once again placed the judiciary under suspicion. Voices that style themselves protectors of the Constitution—Ajit Anjum, Ravish Kumar, Mahua Moitra, Arfa Khanum Sherwani and others—declare the courts “Sanghi” and therefore partial. They invoke the principle that “bail is the rule, jail is the exception,” claiming the judiciary is now breaking its own maxim. Yet the same voices have spent five years producing post after post, video after video, for Umar and Sharjeel. If even five percent of that output had been devoted to the fifteen victims listed above, the imbalance would be undeniable. That is a direct challenge: produce the evidence of comparable coverage, or concede the selectivity.
The pattern is consistent. The 59 Godhra victims receive almost no sustained attention from the same commentators. The Air Force personnel killed by Yasin Malik—someone with whom many of these voices have sat, spoken, or conducted interviews—are rarely named. Azad Ahmed is ignored even though he was Muslim. Meanwhile, Sanjay, an accused in the same Delhi riots who spent five years in jail and whose family maintains his innocence, received no interim bail even after his mother’s death. Umar, by contrast, was granted interim bail to attend his sister’s wedding. No major media house questioned judicial impartiality on Sanjay’s behalf.
Specific stories make the disparity concrete. Ankit Sharma of the Intelligence Bureau went to control the riots. A mob linked to Tahir Hussain dragged him from his own lane, killed him, and threw his body into a drain. His mother had prepared tea for him; it sat untouched. In a Lallantop documentary, a journalist noted that until Ankit’s IB affiliation became known, he was assumed to be a rioter. Umar’s partner can meet him in jail. Ankit’s mother cannot.
Fifteen-year-old Nitin Paswan stepped out only to buy Maggi and was shot in the head. He was about to start Class 9 in full pants for the first time. His parents received his body in hospital. Vinod Kumar was stoned to death in front of his son Monu; no one intervened. His daughter’s wedding will take place without him. Twenty-six-year-old Rahul Solanki was shot in the head. His father raced him toward medical help while rioters blocked roads; the young man died in his father’s arms.
Head Constable Ratan Lal, the sole earner of a household, left home despite fever to confront the violence. His wife was pregnant; his sister was weeks from marriage. He never returned. Veer Bhan Singh was shot in the head in front of his fourteen-year-old daughter and ailing wife. The subsequent lives of that child and that wife remain largely unrecorded.
These deaths, the chargesheet holds, form part of the violence for which Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam face trial. Thousands of families carry the consequences. Yet the homes and surviving relatives of these victims rarely feature in the documentaries that scrutinise police action. When they appear at all, it is often as brief formalities. High-profile lawyers such as Kapil Sibal and Siddharth Dave represent Umar and Sharjeel. The victims’ families depend on the state; if the state loses, they lack the resources to pursue appeals. Every few months the two accused become the centre of viral discussion. In five years the fifteen names have not once commanded comparable public attention.
The same selective lens once declared the Godhra perpetrators effectively beyond sustained moral scrutiny, while guilt was directed primarily at the Hindu community. Poetry and commentary followed that pattern. Mahua Moitra and, earlier, Rahat Indori wrote lines that framed one community as incapable of certain violence. No equivalent poems were written for the fifteen, the fifty-nine, or the far larger number of Hindus killed across longer civilisational conflict.
Videos and commentary about Umar and Sharjeel generate views, revenue, and institutional support. Visiting the homes of the forgotten, documenting their ongoing hardship, and amplifying their stories does not serve the same ecosystem. There is no ready machinery to turn their pain into trends. That imbalance is the point. The argument is not that the accused should be denied due process. It is that consistent attention to every victim—regardless of identity—is the minimum requirement of genuine humanism and journalism. Anything less is agenda, not principle.
If the reasoning here seems sound, the simple act of sharing it helps correct the record. If it does not, the familiar focus on Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam can continue uninterrupted. The names at the beginning of this piece will remain largely unheard either way.
