2020 Tablighi Jamaat COVID-19 hotspot in Delhi

A Tablighi Jamaat religious congregation that took place in Delhi's Nizamuddin Markaz Mosque in early March 2020 was a COVID-19 super-spreader event,^[1] with more than 4,000 confirmed cases^[2] and at least 27 deaths linked to the event reported across the country. Over 9,000 missionaries may have attended the congregation, with the majority being from various states of India,^[3][4] and 960 attendees from 40 foreign countries.^[5] On 18 April, 4,291 confirmed cases of COVID-19 linked to this event by the Union Health Ministry represented a third of all the confirmed cases of India.^[6][7] Around 40,000 people, including Tablighi Jamaat attendees and their contacts, were quarantined across the country.^[6]

The Tablighi Jamaat has received widespread criticism from the Muslim community for holding the congregation despite a ban on public gatherings being issued by the Government of Delhi on 13 March.^[8]

Criminal cases were registered against the congregation attendees in the courts across India. However, in a landmark judgement in August 2020, the Bombay High Court quashed three FIRs against 35 petitioners – 29 of them foreign nationals – who attended a Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Delhi's Nizamuddin in March and travelled from there to different parts of India. The court observed: "A political government tries to find the scapegoat when there is pandemic or calamity and the circumstances show that there is probability that these foreigners were chosen to make them scapegoats."^[9] Some of the Muslims with chargesheets neither attended the Delhi congregation nor were they inclined to the Tablighi ideology, as evidenced in the case of eight individuals with chargesheets, whose case was dismissed by the Saket district court on 25 August 2020.^[10] The Chief Justice of India Sharad Bobde observed "evasiveness" in that the Government of India's affidavit filed in response to petitions challenging the discriminatory and communal coverage of the Tablighi Jamaat incident by some sections of the media. He termed the statements in the document as "unnecessary, nonsensical" averments.^[11] On 16 December 2020, The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate of a Delhi Court, Arun Kumar Garg, acquitted the 36 foreign nationals from 14 countries of all the charges levelled against them. They were facing charges under Section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant), Section 269 (negligent act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Section 3 (disobeying regulation) of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 and Section 51 (obstruction) of Disaster Management Act, 2005.^[12]

Senior BJP leaders like Shivraj Singh Chouhan attributed Tablighi Jamaat congregation for a spike in cases of COVID-19 in the country, a claim which was disputed by experts from Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College in Indore saying that they have no data to link the spread of the pandemic to the congregation.^[13] On the other hand, according to the first report in India tabled before Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan by the Department of Biotechnology in July 2020 on the genome of SARS-CoV-2 has found that a particular variant of the virus brought into the country mainly by travellers from Europe had become the most prominent across the country.^[14] India's first COVID-19 patient was a Keralite student from a state-run university in Wuhan city of China, the centre of the COVID-19 pandemic.^[15]