Shot fired at Indian protest against citizenship law, one hurt
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[January 30, 2020]
By Alasdair Pal and Danish Siddiqui
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - An unidentified man
fired at a protest against India's new citizenship law near a university
in Delhi on Thursday, wounding a student, witnesses said, the first such
incident in the capital during more than a month of demonstrations.
Witnesses said the man holding a gun shouted slogans against the
protesters near Jamia Millia Islamia University, before firing at them.
"The police stood nearby," Ahmed Zahir, a witness, told Reuters.
A Reuters photograph showed the man, dressed in a black jacket and
brandishing a single-barrel weapon, standing meters away from dozens of
policemen outside the university, where more than 1,000 protesters had
gathered for a march.
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Police later said they had detained the suspected gunman but gave no
details.
Protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which fast-tracks Indian
citizenship for non-Muslim minorities from three neighboring countries,
have flared since last December.
Some of the biggest protests have taken place near the university, which
police stormed in December. On Thursday, police barricaded the road
outside the university.
A group of students, most of them women, were holding a sit-in near the
barricade after they were stopped from marching to a memorial for
independence leader Mahatma Gandhi on the anniversary of his
assassination in 1948.
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![](../images/013020pics/news_s33.jpg)
A wounded man is helped after an unidentified man opened fire during
a protest against a new citizenship law outside the Jamia Millia
Islamia university in New Delhi, India, January 30, 2020.
REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government insists the citizenship
law is needed to help members of persecuted religious minorities who
fled to India before 2015 from Muslim-majority Afghanistan,
Bangladesh and Pakistan.
But protesters say the law, and a proposed national register for
citizens, discriminates against Muslims and violates India's secular
constitution.
In recent days, leaders from Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) have called for action against the protesters, who they term
unpatriotic.
This week, India's junior finance minister Anurag Thakur encouraged
supporters at a state election rally in New Delhi to chant slogans
calling for traitors to be shot, drawing a reprimand from the
election commission.
(Additional reporting by Aftab Ahmed; Writing by Devjyot Ghoshal and
Sanjeev Miglani; editing by John Stonestreet and Gareth Jones)
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