If it had not been for Hindu friends who stood between him and an armed mob, Shehzad Zaidi felt, he would not be alive today. On the morni...
If it had not been for Hindu friends who stood between him and an armed mob, Shehzad Zaidi felt, he would not be alive today.
On the morning of February 25, Zaidi had gone to inspect his electrical goods shop in Mahalaxmi Enclave in North East Delhi. From the day before, armed, marauding mobs had been roaming nearby areas, pelting stones, setting buildings ablaze, opening gunfire.
For about two years now, Zaidi has rented the space for his shop from Ramdhari Singh, a grizzled, bespectacled resident of the locality. When he got to his shop around 8 am on Tuesday morning, he found it had been vandalised, all his goods destroyed – he estimates losses of Rs 6-7 lakh.
As he was surveying the damage, Zaidi recounted, an armed mob tried to attack him with knives, slashing open the buttons of his shirt. That was when Singh and another shopkeeper, called Pawan Kumar, placed themselves in front of him and spread their arms out. “Pawan Kumar said, he is my younger brother, nothing should happen to him,” said Zaidi.
Singh was there when Zaidi showed journalists and activists the remains of his shop on Sunday. “They were setting fire to things and I saw him stuck here,...
