Glass shards on Kanwar Yatra route: Delhi Police rubbishes sabotage, communal conspiracy claims

by Oishani Bhattacharya

Glass shards strewn on a stretch of road in Dilshad Garden area in Delhi’s Shahdara district through which Kanwariyas were to travel on foot — footage of this took the social media space recently by storm with some BJP leaders and Right-wing handles smelling a conspiracy in this to disrupt a Hindu religious festival.

The Kanwar Yatra is an annual pilgrimage undertaken by devotees of the Hindu deity Shiva in the month of Sawan, during which they walk barefoot to the Ganges carrying pitchers, fill them with water and visit a temple to pour the holy water on a Shiva lingam. The entire journey often takes several days.

Delhi Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena shard his concern over this on X and stated an FIR had been filed and the Delhi Police crime branch was looking into the matter. He also noted that “the road was cleaned within 2 hours by PWD.”

BJP Delhi vice president and cabinet minister Kapil Mishra, who has often been found making hateful and communal remarks against the Muslim community, posted about this on X claiming “some mischievous elements scattered glass pieces along the Kanwar Yatra route for nearly a kilometre.” (Archive)

PTI reported that BJP Delhi president Virendra Sachdeva had said that the glass shards scattered on the road was a “pre-planned conspiracy” to disrupt communal harmony and that it appeared to be the work of “anti-social elements”. (Archive)

X user Raushan Sinha (@MrSinha_), who as been found amplifying misinformation and communal propaganda several times in the past. shared the viral clip on July 13 with a caption that indicated that someone had done this deliberately to disrupt the journey of the Kanwars. The mention of “Brotherhood, anyone?” in the tweet hints at the alleged involvement of members of the Muslim community, as the term “bhaichara” is frequently used by the Right Wing to mock secular beliefs. At the time of writing this report, the post has over 72,000 views and has been retweeted over 3,000 times. (Archive)

In Delhi, broken glass shards were found scattered along the Kanwar route.

Several other users on social media, such as @KumaarSaagar, @ssaratht and propaganda handles such as @SudarshanNewsDL, @OpIndia_com, made the same claim — that the glass shards had been deliberately scattered across the route of the Kanwariyas to sabotage their pilgrimage. Below are a few instances. (Archives 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

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Fact Check

To verify the facts, we ran a relevant keyword search and found several relevant news reports. According to a report by the Hindu published on July 14, Delhi police had already made an arrest in this case based on an FIR filed by a junior PWD engineer at the Seemapuri police station on July 13. The person detained is an e-rickshaw driver who was seen on CCTV crossing the same route and carrying glass panels on his vehicle.

The report quoted a police officer saying that the driver was transporting 19 glass panels in his e-rickshaw from Shalimar Garden, Uttar Pradesh, to north-east Delhi’s Seelampur. The glasses fell and broke while he was on the way.

On X, ANI directly addressed Kapil Sharma’s tweet and posted a response by Delhi Police, which said that glass panels had broken when an e-rickshaw was carrying 19 of them from Shalimar Garden to Seelampur. The driver, identified as Kusum Pal, had been detained.

Alt News reached out to a senior police officer at Seemapuri police station to confirm whether their investigation had revealed any angle of sabotage or conspiracy, and the police officer categorically denied the same. “There is no communal or sabotage angle in this case. The glass panels accidentally fell and broke into pieces while he (the driver) was transporting them,” the police officer said.

We also came across a news report by the Indian Express which, too, had identified the e-rickshaw driver as Kusum Pal.

Hence, the assertion that the glass shards found on the road in Delhi’s Shahdara were deliberately scattered to cause harm to the Kanwariyas or that it was a communal conspiracy is completely false.

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