Who Stole My Youth?

A Delhi district court granted Mohammad Iqbal bail in the riots case within three months. On March 18, 2025, he was discharged in the Babbu murder case, even as the riots trial continues

- By MRINALINI DHYANI

COME meet me, beloved, when will you come?” (Aao milo sajna, kab miloge?) The words were carved into the wooden plank before it came crashing down on Mohammad Iqbal's legs. Again. And again. In the police station that night, the message felt like a taunt, mocking and almost intimate, etched into the same object used to break his body. Years later, the pain remains, marking for him a life divided into before and after that night. Iqbal was arrested on March 7, 2020, nearly two weeks after the violence in northeast Delhi had subsided. He stepped out to buy meat, despite his mother's warning, and at the last moment took a different lane at a friend's suggestion. “I regret that moment to this day,” he says quietly. “If I hadn't changed the route, I wouldn't have been picked up.”

That friend was released early. Iqbal wasn't. The police detained him and others, accused them of pelting stones at a house Iqbal claimed he hadn't heard of, and then beat them up. “I screamed louder, hoping that they would stop,” he recalls. He was arrested the same day and sent to jail on March 8, 2020. What followed were eleven months behind bars and a murder charge added just when he thought he was about to walk free. He sits in a small room on the terrace of a congested four-storey building, clothes hanging from nails in place of a cupboard. This was his mother-in-law's house, where he lived after his marriage in 2023, before moving to a nearby slum that costs Rs 3,000 a month. The move, he says, was driven less by money than by trauma.