Is there a similarity between what has played out in Delhi over the past three days and earlier incidents of communal violence? Yes there is. We saw all of this in the capital in 1984 when the Congress-led government presided over the massacre of thousands of Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi may have been a so-called “inexperienced” prime minister but his home minister, Narasimha Rao, was no babe in the woods and the Delhi Police had tonnes of “experience”. Yet they allowed more than 3000 people to be killed.

Narendra Modi’s Reckless Politics Brings Mob Rule to New Delhi