HASHIMPURA 22 MAY
The Forgotten Story of India's Biggest Custodial Killing
Vibhuti Narain Rai
(Translated by Darshan Desai)
Penguin Random House
180 pages; Rs 399
September 7 is the third anniversary of the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts in western Uttar Pradesh (UP). Some 62 people, mostly Muslims, died and over 30,000 people were displaced and still live in 65 refugee camps. The guilty are yet to be convicted. It would be surprising if they ever are.
Muzaffarnagar is a shameful episode but it is, sadly, not the worst communal carnage since 1947. The most horrific were: Gujarat 1969, Nellie 1983, Delhi 1984, Maliyana (Meerut) 1987, Bhagalpur 1989, Mumbai 1993 and Gujarat 2002.
Most of these follow a similar script. Rampaging mobs kill minority community men, rape women and pillage homes. Sometimes, leaders of the ruling party, whether Congress or Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), lead the mobs or covertly support them. The police actively help the mobs in "teaching" Muslims and, in some instances, Sikhs and Christians, a "lesson".
What happened on May 22, 1987 in Hashimpura, a locality in Meerut, 90 minutes' drive from New Delhi, was horrifyingly different. And, had it not been for Vibhuti Narain Rai, a police officer and some of his colleagues, the most heinous custodial killing of the last 70 years would have never caught national attention.
On that day, a group of men from UP's armed reserve police picked out 42 Muslim youths from a crowd of 500 people, loaded them into a police truck and took them near a water canal 50 km away. One by one these men were pulled out, bullets pumped into them and their bodies thrown into the water. The cops then returned to their camp and went to sleep.
The bodies were found in the area under Mr Rai's jurisdiction - he was then superintendent of police, Ghaziabad. Along with his colleagues, including District Magistrate Nasim Zaidi, now Chief Election Commissioner of India, he spent the night searching for survivors among the blood-soaked bodies strewn around the Hindon canal near the Delhi-Ghaziabad border.
For the next few hours, Mr Rai and others spoke to five of the victims who survived by pretending to be dead. Their accounts left little doubt that the youths were killed in cold blood by the men of the 41st battalion of UP's Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC).
In later years, Mr Rai tracked down the survivors, the perpetrators as well as officials and politicians associated with the incident to piece together the events leading up to the Hashimpura killings and its aftermath. What makes the account rare is his attempt to understand the psyche and motives of the killers. Why would the PAC men, who didn't even know these young men, kill them in cold blood?
The immediate reason for Hashimpura was the Vishva Hindu Parishad's Ram Janmabhoomi movement, which was at a crescendo. A few months before, Rajiv Gandhi, then prime minister, had tried to benefit from this religious polarisation by allowing Hindus to pray inside the Babri mosque.
In May, 1987, Meerut burnt, as Hindu mobs killed Muslims. The PAC, paramilitary and even the Army that was sent in were blatantly partisan. The media, particularly the Hindi newspapers, played their part. In the midst of this, Prabhat Kaushik, brother of Major Satish Chandra Kaushik and nephew of local BJP leader Shakuntala Sharma, was killed on May 21.
It was suspected that the 21-year-old, possibly active in the rioting, was killed by bullets fired from a Muslim mohalla. A stray bullet from security personnel could also have been the cause of death but no post-mortem was conducted. The 41st PAC battalion, led by Surendra Pal Singh, reached Hashimpura and Major Kaushik, then posted at Meerut Cantonment, was seen assisting them. Mr Rai writes about secret meetings at which it was decided to teach Muslims "a lesson".
Mr Rai says the Hashimpura tragedy reflects the deep-seated prejudices that lead to communal violence. He says most Hindus believe the Muslim to be the aggressor when riots occur, since, in their view, he is non-vegetarian and, therefore, inherently violent. This, when official government records conclusively prove that "not only are more Muslims affected, but in many cases, the fatalities from the community have been registered to be more than 90 per cent".
Several years later, Mr Rai caught up with Surendra Pal Singh, who kept repeating that Meerut had become a "mini-Pakistan" and Muslims needed to be taught a Hashimpura-type lesson. Mr Rai told him that most of those who died in the 1987 Meerut riots were Muslims. "This brought, for the first time, an expression of disbelief on his face." The overarching mind-set of the government machinery, he writes, is similar to that of Mr Singh's.
Mr Rai has also written about his experience in trying to make Congress Chief Minister Vir Bahadur Singh aware of the enormity of the incident and the role played by the Prime Minister's Office. No mainstream newspaper was willing to publish the story. Years later, he discovered that Meerut's Congress MP, Mohsina Kidwai, refused to help the survivors; it was former diplomat Syed Shahabuddin, then a Janata Party MP, who provided them shelter and medical assistance. Subramanian Swamy even went on a hunger strike demanding justice for Hashimpura victims.
In Hashimpura, the Indian state collectively failed, Mr Rai says. The court case had a predictable denouement . On March 21, 2015, nearly 28 years later, all the accused walked out of Delhi's Tis Hazari courts as exonerated men. An appeal has been filed, but he doesn't seem optimistic. As he writes, "Yet another phase of many years of hopelessly waiting has begun."
