While the authorities across the country are scrambling to identify the Markas attendees who participated in the congregation in Nizamuddin in mid-March, a team of health officials in Ahmednagar were beaten up by contacts of Markas attendees on the suspicion that they are collecting information for the Citizenship Amendment Act(CAA), NPR and NPR. The health officials were simply involved in- contact tracing, the process of identification of persons who may have come into contact with an infected person (“contacts”) and subsequent collection of further information about these contacts.

#Breaking | 3 people have been arrested in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar for beating up health officials.



More details by TIMES NOW’s Kajal. pic.twitter.com/HcoMo3cgJ9 — TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) April 1, 2020

On March 29, Sunday, 2 positive COVID-19 cases with the history of attending the Markas Nizamuddin had come to the fore. Following this discovery, the health officials in the region on Monday started contact tracing by visiting door to door in the village of Ahmednagar seeking details from the residents about their past travel, and if they had come in contact with suspected Markas attendees, considering the participants of Markas attendees were Islamic preachers. The protruding questions fuelled misgivings among the residents who thought the officials are seeking details for CAA and NPR. The residents then thwacked the health officials and stopped them from tracing contacts who may have come in touch with Markas attendees and contracted the deadly contagion.

A case was registered for obstruction of duties of government officials after which 3 people involved in the assault of the health officials were arrested by the police.

The deaths of 10 people from COVID-19 who had attended a congregation in Nizamuddin touched off a massive manhunt to identify the myriad participants from different states that attended the religious event held On March 21 in Delhi’s Nizamuddin area by the Tablighi Jamaat, a Sunni organisation. More than 1700 Muslims had assembled for Tablighi Jamaat at Nizamuddin Markaz in South Delhi out of which around 1530 hailed from India and rest from the foreign countries.

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The thousands who took part in the event later returned to their homes in virtually every state. Many of these reported COVID-19 cases are linked to the Tablighi Jamaat. The state governments have now started identifying and locating these people in order to stop the transmission of Chinese virus in the population.