Hashimpura Massacre

Imagine such a close encounter with death that when you open your eyes to bodies – dead and half-dead – you want to touch them to believe you are still alive. When molten lead rips through your flesh and flings you into the air like a cotton ball, there is no pain, no fear, not even time for memories to torment you. There are rifles blazing around you and then there is the cacophony of abusive screams from your killers. ….How will you describe such a death? Especially when you are seeing your killers for the first time, and despite racking your brains you just cannot figure out why they would want to kill you. (An excerpt from the translated version of VN Rai’s yet to be released book on the Hashimpura massacre)

                

On May 22, 1987, 19 members of the 41 B battalion of Uttar Pradesh’s Provincial Armed Constabulary murdered 42 Muslim men, mostly daily wagers and weavers from Meerut’s Hashimpura locality. Next year, it will be a quarter of a century of what has since been labelled the Hashimpura massacre… 25 years without justice. The massacre was played out in two parts. A truck carrying the men who had been picked up was taken to the Upper Ganga canal in Muradnagar, Ghaziabad district. Some men were thrown out of the truck and killed there. An hour later the remaining were taken to the Hindon river canal near Mubarakpur where the gruesome ritual of shooting them and throwing them into the canal was repeated. Of the four men who escaped the first shooting, one lodged an FIR. From the second incident, there were two survivors. One of them lodged the FIR. The platoon was commanded by Surinder Pal Singh.

The immediate provocation for this were the communal riots which had broken out in the city following the Rajiv Gandhi-led government’s decision to throw open the Babri Masjid to Hindus. More than 50 Muslim men were picked up from Hashimpura despite the fact that there was no rioting in the area. Subsequent inquiries, both independent and governmental, have revealed the horror of the massacre.

One man who has been researching the massacre for the last 23 years is Vibhuti Narain Rai, then SP, Ghaziabad, who lodged the reports. Now the vice-chancellor at Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, Wardha, in Maharashtra, Rai says: “This case is a challenge for Indian democracy. Our senior leadership has to ensure that such incidents do not recur. The perpetrators of such ghastly crimes should not go unpunished.”

Though Rai is hopeful of justice being meted out in the case, the trial remains stuck in a Delhi court where it came from a Ghaziabad court following a directive from the Supreme Court. In the first 12 years of the case, only three of the 164 witnesses had deposed. The initial shoddy investigation was carried out by the UP criminal investigation department.

Senior journalist Darshan Desai, who is translating the book, says: “Gujarat knows the whys and hows of what happened in 2002, since it enjoyed 24x7 media coverage and support from alert  activists. But UP doesn’t, and basks in the glory of its avowed Ganga-Jamuna tradition.” He added: “the court cases do not answer why innocent people, unknown to their killers, were picked up randomly and shot What is extremely poignant is that even now, 25 years down the line, the investigators are simply not aware, or don’t wish to reveal the motive behind the crime.”

Some of the unanswered questions that Desai speaks of are: why did the massacre happen; was it the decision of a sub-inspector of the PAC to plan the gruesome incident; was there political complicity; weren’t senior officials of the state aware of the atrocity?

In June 2007, family members of the victims used the Right to Information (RTI) to find out some of the answers to the crime. Among other things, they wanted to know why those PAC men charged with the murder were allowed to continue in service, why the state sanctioned prosecution against only 19 PAC men and not all those indicted in the report, what departmental proceedings and disciplinary action, if any, were initiated against them and who pressurised the investigating agency. The reply revealed that after 16 of the accused surrendered before the Ghaziabad court in 2000, they were subsequently released on bail and reinstated.

How does then one answer Zaibun Nisa as she shares the horror of discovering that one of the bodies floating in the canal was that of her husband? “I had given birth to my daughter Uzma the day my husband was taken away. I still don’t know how I should feel about the day,” she says. How  indeed?