An injured young man lifted a flute and played Vaishnava Jana To, the hymn Mahatma Gandhi loved most, at 10 Janpath on Wednesday, 14 October. He is known online as the creator behind the YouTube channel “Peeing Human”, and he had come to Rahul Gandhi’s press conference with the marks of the Delhi Police still on him. When he lowered the flute, he said: “Nafrat ka jawab pyar se diya jaega.” (hatred will be answered with love). Athira, a student from Kerala, said police beatings had left her deaf in one ear. Another protester said something harsher. “Detention centres remind me of the Nazi times. There should be Nuremberg trials in India,” he said. The protests began over the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls which has excluded 133 million voters, and protesters want Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign. On October 10 alone, about 7,000 people were reportedly detained in Delhi. Amnesty International put the figure above 5,000. The UN human rights office urged the release of people it described as arbitrarily detained. India’s foreign ministry called that “extreme selectivity” and said police had acted according to law. One of the places the detainees were taken was a community centre in Pandwalan Khurd, a village on Delhi’s south-western edge about 40 km from Connaught Place. The chilling accounts from protestors, lawyers, journalists and other passersby taken there now raise an uncomfortable question: Is Pandwalan Khurd Delhi’s Papa II? Not yet, and not by a very long distance. The longer answer is that the method on display in Delhi will be familiar to anyone who has read Kashmir’s archive of custodial torture, and that is reason enough to look at the two together. thewire.in