History repeats itself: Delhi Assembly election 2025 under 2020’s shadow

Karl Marx once quipped that history repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as farce. As Delhi prepares to vote tomorrow, this aphorism feels uncomfortably apt. The 2025 Delhi Assembly elections may lack the vitriol of the 2020 polls when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unleashed an unabashedly Islamophobic campaign in response to the Shaheen Bagh protests against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Yet, the echoes of that tumultuous period are unmistakable, lending the current electoral drama a farcical quality.

The ghost of 2020

The 2020 Delhi elections are remembered not just for the BJP’s electoral setback but for the anti-Muslim pogrom that followed.

The violence erupted in north-east Delhi, coinciding with the visit of US President Donald Trump.

The timing was grimly ironic: as Trump dined at Rashtrapati Bhavan, live streams of mobs attacking Muslim neighbourhoods flooded social media. 

Officially, 53 people were killed, two-thirds of them Muslims.

Unofficially more than 100 were killed, mostly Muslims. At least that’s what most Muslims in affected places like Ashok Nagar, Baburpur, Bhajanpura, Brij Vihar, Chandbagh, Gokulpuri, Jaffrabad, Karawalnagar, Khajuri Khas, Loni, Maujpur, Shiv Vihar, etc, would claim even now. 

The pogrom exposed a chilling new template for communal violence: mobilising teenagers from outside the city to evade accountability, with alleged complicity from the police.

Even the West’s mainstream media like the BBC or The Washington Post had critical coverage of the crime.

But the Indian mainstream media had promoted Modi’s deputy Amit Shah’s version. Shah, the Union home minister, said that the “professional assessment is that the violence in the capital has been spontaneous”, giving a clean chit to the Hindutva camp.

On the afternoon of February 23rd 2020, Kapil Mishra, a BJP leader and Hindutva firebrand, had ominously warned protesting Muslim women at Delhi’s Maujpur-Chandbagh Road that the streets would be “cleared” once Trump left.

Mishra issued the threats standing beside Amit Sharma, the Delhi Police’s then deputy commissioner of the Shahdara range.

His supporters, however, didn’t show patience. That very afternoon, they descended on the anti-CAA protest sites armed with rods and bottles, igniting days of violence. 

The BJP, fresh from its landslide victory in the 2019 general elections, seemed to exact revenge on a city that had snubbed it, increasing its tally in the Delhi Assembly from three seats to a still-meagre seven.

The aftermath: Justice delayed, justice denied

In the years since, arrests have been made—but almost exclusively of Muslims. Scholars like Umar Khalid and even an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) councillor, Tahir Hussain, who helped save lives during the violence now languish in jail.

Meanwhile, BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leaders accused of inciting the riots remain untouched. 

Those Muslims, including Khalid, who have been arrested for their alleged role in the Delhi pogrom, are even denied bail for over five years, while the convicts of rape and murder are given parole multiple times. 

This selective justice has deepened the disillusionment of Delhi’s Muslim community, who feel abandoned by Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP, their supposed ally. 

The party, which peddled soft Hindutva during the 2020 elections, remained conspicuously silent as its voters bore the brunt of the violence.

Kejriwal’s silence amid the macabre violence was not just petty, but alarming.

2025 Delhi Assembly elections: Familiar playbook

Fast forward to the Delhi Assembly elections in 2025, and the BJP’s strategy remains unchanged.

Hindutva polarisation is once again its weapon of choice.

The party has dusted off its old narratives, accusing Kejriwal and his AAP government of failing to deliver basic services. 

The AAP, meanwhile, is reeling from the fallout of its controversial excise policy, which was scrapped after allegations of corruption.

Kejriwal and his close aides, including Manish Sisodia and Satyendra Jain, now out on bail, can face imprisonment in the graft case, tarnishing the party’s once-pristine anti-corruption image.

The Congress party, part of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), has also turned its guns on the AAP, threatening to split the anti-BJP vote in at least 15 constituencies.

With seven Lok Sabha seats already in its pocket, the BJP holds a strategic advantage in the city with a mammoth north Indian Hindu population. 

The AAP, on the other hand, is left playing the victim card, even as the BJP poaches its disgruntled officials by dangling lucrative baits.

Moreover, even after five years, the Kejriwal-led party or its new chief minister, Atishi Singh, failed to condemn the 2020 Delhi anti-Muslim pogrom and demand justice for the Muslim victims.

Fear grips the Muslims

As Delhi votes, two events loom large, stoking fear among the city’s marginalised Muslim community.

First, Modi’s planned dip in the sacred confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and Saraswati at Prayagraj during the Kumbh Mela. Televised live, the event is expected to amplify the BJP’s polarisation efforts. 

Second, Trump’s return to the White House and Modi’s scheduled visit to the US in late February—the same time when the 2020 pogrom unfolded amid Trump’s India visit—has sparked a sense of déjà vu. 

Trump’s silence on Modi’s anti-minority policies during his first term has left many fearing tacit American support for a renewed wave of communal violence.

With a large number of Hindutva-incensed anti-Muslim bigots, including Tulsi Gabbard, seizing posh slots in the Trump 2.0 administration, it’s expected that the BJP will receive a fillip in its attempt to stoke communal tension in India.

Many Muslims of Delhi the correspondent spoke to have expressed fear regarding safety, as they fear bulldozers razing their slums and ghettos if the BJP sweeps the polls and a new lease of pogroms if it loses.

In either case, the Muslims have to suffer, opined some of them.

A community under siege

For Delhi’s Muslims, the scars of 2020 remain fresh. The pogrom devastated businesses in mixed neighbourhoods, crippling micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in violence-hit areas.

The 2020 pogrom had its underlying economic reasons and it seems that crippling the MSMEs in North East Delhi was one among them.

With inflation soaring and unemployment high, the community, discriminated at jobs and lacks capital to run big businesses in the capital, is struggling to recover and sustain.

Many Muslims have fled from places like Ashok Nagar, Bhajanpura, Brij Vihar, Chandbagh, Gokulpuri, Karawalnagar, Maujpur, Shiv Vihar, etc, to Muslim ghettos like Seelampur in North East and Jamia Nagar in South-East Delhi, seeking safety from rising Islamophobia and intimidation in mixed colonies.

The BJP’s control over Delhi’s law and order, particularly the Delhi Police, offers little hope for justice or protection.

The mainstream opposition’s indifference to the minority community’s plight has only deepened their sense of abandonment.

As one resident of a Muslim ghetto put it, “We are caught between a rock and a hard place—betrayed by those who claim to represent us and targeted by those who don’t.”

A tragic cycle

The 2025 Delhi Assembly elections are a stark reminder of how little has changed since 2020. The BJP’s reliance on Hindutva polarisation, the AAP’s moral compromises, and the Congress’s opportunism have left Delhi’s Muslims trapped in a tragic cycle of fear and disillusionment. As Marx might have observed, history is repeating itself in 2025—not as tragedy or farce, but as both.