Victims
Of Meerut's Hashimpura
Killings: Brutalised, But Not Broken
By Harsh Mander
19 December, 2006
HindustanTimes.com
The
police bullet pierced through his shoulder, stunning him with pain.
If it had entered his body just a few inches lower, he would have died,
like the forty other young men that the constables had bundled into
the truck with him. They took him for dead, throwing him into the canal.
Zulfikar was then 17 years old.
A few hours earlier, constables
of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) had surrounded Hashimpura,
a working class and predominantly Muslim colony of factory workers and
weavers in Meerut. It was the evening of May 22, 1987, and the city
was still smouldering with the fires of more than a month of embittered
and brutal rioting, that had left many slain by police bullets and burning
alive, hundreds of homes, factories, shops and vehicles gutted, and
people of both communities convulsed with sullen hate and anger.
The PAC forced all the residents
of Hashimpura out of their homes onto the road, and searched their homes,
randomly smashing their furniture and valuables. It was the sacred month
of Ramzan, and most were still observing the ritual fasting as they
tensely cowered for hours outside their homes. Almost all the able-bodied
men, totalling 324 according to official records, all Muslim, were arrested
and crowded into police trucks. They were first driven to police lock-ups,
where they were beaten with police batons. They were then shifted to
jails, where they were attacked
by prisoners, leaving five dead.
In Hashimpura, after the
strong able-bodied men were arrested and driven away, nearly 50 among
the teenaged and old men who remained behind were then rounded up by
the PAC constables into a yellow truck. Many of their loved ones wailed
as they were driven away. Yet, none dreamed that this would be the last
time that they would see most of them alive.
Zulfikar and others thought
that they too would be driven to the police station. They panicked when
the truck instead began to drive them out of the city; they shouted
hopelessly but there were none to heed their cries in the shrouds of
curfew. The truck rumbled to a halt more than an hour later near the
banks of the Upper Ganga Canal in Muradnagar, Ghaziabad. By then, the
sun had set. The terrified men packed in the truck still did not know
what the men in khaki planned for them.
The man nearest the edge
was first pulled down, and the sound of rifle-fire echoed through the
uneasy silence; he fell, and his body was dragged to the canal and thrown
in. A second man was then pulled down, and met the same fate. Zulfikar
was the third. The bullet passed through his shoulder; he too collapsed,
but was alive. He held his breath, and the constables took him for dead,
and flung him also into the canal. He floated briefly, but soon found
himself tangled in some weeds, which he grabbed and silently waited
with intense foreboding, blood flowing from his bullet wound into the
water.
By then, the men in the truck
comprehended the terrible truth of what was happening, and they raised
a great uproar. The constables panicked, and changed track. They mounted
the truck and opened fire blindly, killing at least half the men there.
They dragged out the bodies and threw them into the canal. The remaining
men fell silent in cold terror, recalling their God and those they loved,
certain now that they would not escape alive.
Zulfikar listened as the
truck finally drove away. He came to know later that they then drove
to the Hindon Canal, and completed the massacre of the remaining men.
Of the nearly 50 men who the PAC picked up, only six survived. A policeman
later testified to seeing the blood-stained PAC truck enter the premises
of the camp of the PAC.
Zulkifar finally pulled himself
out of the canal an hour later, and hid in a urinal. He had to continue
his fast amid the stench of urine and his throbbing shoulder the next
24 hours, until he felt it was safe to slink to the home of a relative
the next night. Days later, he took a bus to the home of Syed Shahabuddin,
MP, in Delhi, and together they broke the story of the massacre in a
press conference to a (briefly) outraged world.
Meanwhile, many bodies were
found floating in the canal. The Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad,
VN Rai, insisted on filing police complaints, even though the top political
and police leadership reportedly wanted to suppress the story for fear
of a rebellion in the forces. In 1988, the state government directed
the Crime Branch Central Investigation Department (CBCID) to investigate,
but its report, submitted six years later in 1994, was never made public,
and no charges were initially framed.
However, the survivors and
members of the families of those killed moved the Supreme Court in 1995
to make the report public and to prosecute those indicted in it. The
court refused to intervene, and instead asked the petitioners to approach
the High Court. The case remains unresolved in the High Court, but the
state government finally bowed to pressure in 1996 by
filing criminal chargesheets against 19 PAC personnel. Not a single
senior official is included in the chargesheet. Even the 19 of the accused
from the lower ranks of the PAC were not arrested, despite 23 non-bailable
arrest warrants. They were in active service, but the government pleaded
that they were 'absconding' throughout!
Ultimately, rights activist
Iqbal Ansari and relatives of those slaughtered applied to the Supreme
Court to transfer the case, in the interests of justice, from Uttar
Pradesh to Delhi, which it ordered in September 2002. More years were
allowed to pass over the wrangle of which government should appoint
the special public prosecutor. The case continued to be adjourned on
technical grounds, enabled by a reluctant public prosecutor appointed
by the Uttar Pradesh government. Human rights lawyers Vrinda Grover
and Rebecca John took up the reins as their advocates.
It was finally in May 2006,
19 years almost to the day after the massacre, that charges were finally
framed against the accused. Three of the accused have died, the remaining
16 appear in every hearing in the cramped untidy Tis Hazari courtroom
and listen tensely to the statements of the survivors - but continue
in active service. A large number of residents of Hashimpura crowd the
courtroom. All working class people, many widowed and aged, unsupported
by any organisation, gather money from their own savings for travel
for every court hearing, only to give wordless strength to each other
as they speak out their harrowing truths in court.
Zulfikar, now 36, knows that
the battle in the courts will be arduous. Yet, he still longs above
all for justice. "Those who did this zulm must be punished. We
do not want our children to see such a day again. It is for this that
we fight." Some fear that they may still lose the case, but their
lawyer Vrinda Grover counters, "The survivors and their families
have already won. By their brave resolute epic fight. By bringing 16
PAC men to court every hearing. If the case is dismissed, it is the
country that will lose. But not them. They have already won."
Harsh Mander
is the convenor of Aman Biradari, a people's campaign for secularism,
peace and justice.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights