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India in 2020: Defining images from each month

Protests, pandemic, and more protests – Al Jazeera maps a turbulent year in the South Asian country through pictures.

January 18: Female protesters listen to a speaker inside a tent at the protest site in New Delhi's Shaheen Bagh area. Muslim women transcended the confines of their homes to lay claim to the streets of this nondescript Muslim neighbourhood in the capital and slowly transformed it into a nerve centre of resistance against a controversial new citizenship law. The women, sitting in the middle of a major highway, took turns maintaining a round-the-clock sit-in for more than a month. [Altaf Qadri/AP Photo]
Published On 15 Dec 2020

 

February 24: A group of men chanting pro-Hindu slogans beat Mohammad Zubair, a 37-year-old Muslim, during the worst religious violence in New Delhi in decades. Four days of unrest in the Indian capital left dozens of people dead and hundreds wounded. The unrest was triggered after weeks-long peaceful sit-ins in New Delhi against a new citizenship law, which critics say discriminates against Muslims. Residential areas in northeast Delhi were attacked by Hindu nationalist mobs. [Danish Siddiqui//Reuters]
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March 28: Police inspector Rajesh Babu wears a coronavirus-themed helmet while speaking to a family on a motorbike at a checkpoint during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 disease in the southern city of Chennai. The streets of India's cities were largely deserted after the government announced a 21-day initial lockdown, which was later extended. [Arun Sankar/AFP]
April 28: Migrant workers from the Indian state of Maharashtra, seen here on the outskirts of Hyderabad city, walk along a national highway to reach their hometowns during a nationwide lockdown imposed by the government as a preventive measure against the spread of COVID-19. After India announced its coronavirus lockdown on March 24, tens of thousands of migrant workers in cities left for their homes in one of the biggest mass movements of people in the country since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. [Noah Seelam/AFP]
May 26: A shantytown resident pours water to extinguish a fire in New Delhi. More than 1000 shanties were destroyed by a major fire in the area which houses mostly daily wage labourers from other Indian states. [Manish Swarup/AP Photo]
Indian paramilitary soldiers stand guard at check post along a highway leading to Ladakh, at Gagangeer some 81 kilometers from Srinagar [Farooq Khan/EPA]
June 17: Indian paramilitary soldiers stand guard at a checkpoint along a highway leading to Ladakh, at Gagangir some 81km (50 miles) from the region's main city of Srinagar. At least 20 Indian army personnel, including a colonel, and an undisclosed number of Chinese soldiers were reportedly killed in brutal hand-to-hand combat in Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh, bringing the two Asian giants to the brink of another war. [Farooq Khan/EPA]
July 6: A relative wearing protective gear binds the body of a victim who died from the COVID-19 disease before the burial at a graveyard in New Delhi. India announced on July 6 that it has nearly 700,000 coronavirus cases, taking it past Russia to become the third-hardest-hit nation in the global pandemic. It currently is the second worst-hit country after the US. [Sajjad Hussain/AFP]
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August 5: Indian policemen stop vehicles at a checkpoint on the first anniversary of the scrapping of Indian-administered Kashmir's special status, in Srinagar. On August 5, 2019, India repealed Article 370 of the Indian constitution that granted a special semi-autonomous status to India's only Muslim-majority region, dividing it into two federal territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. [Farooq Khan/EPA]
September 30: Protesters against gang rape and killing of a woman in Uttar Pradesh's Hathras district hold onto each other as Indian policemen try to detain them in New Delhi, India. The 19-year-old victim, belonging to the Dalit community - formerly known as the "untouchables" - was attacked and raped on September 14 at a field near her home in Hathras district, 100km (62 miles) from New Delhi. [Altaf Qadri/AP Photo]
October 15: Residents being evacuated from a flooded neighbourhood after record heavy rains lashed the southern city of Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana state. [Vinod Babu/Reuters]
November 15: A man walks along the Rajpath street near the iconic India Gate amid smoggy conditions a day after Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, in New Delhi. India's environmental court ordered a ban on firecrackers during the country’s biggest annual festival in cities battling hazardously poor air quality, citing a link between pollution and a coronavirus surge. [Sajjad Hussain/AFP]
December 14: Farmers listen to their protest leaders during a day-long hunger strike at the Delhi-Haryana border, on the outskirts of New Delhi. Tens of thousands of Indian farmers have been protesting for weeks across India demanding the quashing of three new farm laws that they say will drive down crop prices and devastate their earnings. [Manish Swarup/AP Photo]