❈ ❈ ❈

Meerut Killings: 34-Year Battle for Justice

Qurban Ali

May 23, 2021, is the 34th anniversary of the killing of 72 Muslims in Meerut’s Maliana village, allegedly by the notorious Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) of Uttar Pradesh.

The trial has been on in a Meerut sessions court for over three decades and more than 800 “dates” have been given but there’s been no justice yet. The last hearing took place four years ago.

Petitioners who have moved Allahabad High Court seeking a reinvestigation and speedy trial say key documents, including the FIR, have disappeared. On April 19 this year, the high court directed the Uttar Pradesh government to respond.

The Maliana massacre, however, was not an isolated event. It was part of weeks of rioting in Meerut between April and June 1987 that, according to government estimates, killed 174 people while unofficial studies and reports suggest the figure was about 350.

The killings included the ghastly Hashimpura massacre of May 22 in which the PAC is alleged to have taken away 48 Muslims from Hashimpura village, shot them and thrown the bodies into a canal and a river. Six of them survived.

Another 12 Muslims are said to have been killed by prison officials in the Meerut and Fatehgarh jails during this period.

The run-up to the riots went like this: On April 14, 1987, while the Nauchandi fair was in full swing in Meerut, communal violence broke out. An allegedly drunken sub-inspector of police was said to have been struck by a firecracker while on duty. He opened fire, killing two Muslims.

The same day, Muslims had organised a religious sermon near the Hashimpura crossing, close to the venue of a mundan event held by a Hindu family at Purwa Shaikhlal. Some Muslims objected to film songs being played on loudspeakers, which led to a quarrel.

The Hindu side is said to have fired first. The Muslims then allegedly torched some Hindu shops. Twelve people, both Hindus and Muslims, were reported killed. A curfew was imposed and the situation controlled, but the incident lit the fire that burnt Meerut for weeks.

On May 17, there was rioting in Kainchiyan Mohalla. By May 18, the violence had spread to Hapur Road, Pilokheri and other areas. On May 19, curfew was imposed on the city with 11 PAC companies brought in to help an estimated 60,000-strong local police.

From then on, the character of the “riots” changed — from clashes between Hindu and Muslim mobs to alleged killings of Muslims by the forces.

Bodies in well

On May 23, eyewitnesses say, “the PAC led by senior officers including the commandant of the 44th battalion R.D. Tripathi entered Maliana about 2.30pm and killed more than 70 Muslims”. Several bodies were found in a well.

The Congress administration of chief minister Vir Bahadur Singh declared 10 people dead before raising the figure to 12 and then to 15. A judicial inquiry by Justice G.L. Srivastav, a retired Allahabad High Court judge, started on August 27, 1987, and handed in its report on July 31, 1989. It was never made public.

An FIR was lodged but did not accuse PAC personnel. Maliana’s Muslims say the investigation was “shoddy” and the chargesheet weak.

In 34 years, the Meerut sessions court trying the case has examined only 3 of the 35 prosecution witnesses.

The main FIR, the basis of the entire case against 95 alleged rioters from nearby villages, suddenly “disappeared” in 2010. The “search” for the FIR is still on.

Bodies in canal

A day before the Maliana killings, the PAC and the army had surrounded Hashimpura. All the residents were lined up on the main road, males aged above 50 or below 12 were segregated, and 48 among the rest were forced onto a truck.

They were driven to Muradnagar and many of them were allegedly shot by the PAC. More than 20 bodies were found floating in the Ganga canal.

The rest of the captives were taken to the Hindon river near the Delhi border where they were allegedly shot and dumped into the water. Altogether, 42 died.

On May 29, the state government announced it would suspend Tripathi, who had also faced allegations during the 1982 Meerut riots. But Tripathi was never actually suspended and continued to receive promotions till his retirement.

A CBI inquiry ordered by Rajiv Gandhi’s central government submitted a report that was never made officially public. A crime branch-CID probe headed by then state police chief Jangi Singh, in its report, recommended prosecuting 37 PAC personnel and police officers. The state government sanctioned the prosecution of 19, of whom 3 died during the trial.

A chargesheet was filed in 1996 but none of the accused appeared before the Ghaziabad court until 2000, when 16 accused PAC men surrendered, got bail, and returned to resume their service.

The Supreme Court transferred the case to Delhi in 2002 on a plea from the victims’ families but hearings couldn’t begin till November 2004 because the Uttar Pradesh government had not appointed a public prosecutor for the case.

On March 21, 2015, the additional sessions judge held the evidence was insufficient and acquitted all the accused. Eventually, on October 31, 2018, Delhi High Court overturned the trial court order and convicted the 16 PAC personnel, sentencing them to life terms.

Jail killings

More than 2,500 people appear to have been arrested during the 1987 Meerut riots. Reports and records of June 3, 1987, suggest that five accused were killed in Meerut jail and seven in Fatehgarh jail. All of them were Muslims.

A magisterial inquiry into the Fatehgarh killings said that six inmates had died of injuries, some of them suffered in “scuffles that took place inside the jail”.

According to reports, several jail staff were suspended and departmental proceedings launched against the chief head warder, a deputy jailor and the deputy superintendent of the prison.

Three murder cases relating to these six deaths were registered but the FIRs contained no names despite certain officials being indicted by the inquiry. So, no prosecution was ever launched in these 34 years.

Independently, the state government ordered an administrative inquiry into the riots that took place between May 18 and 22, but left out Maliana and the killings in Meerut and Fatehgarh jails.

The report was not placed before the legislature or the public.

Fresh plea

Now a public interest plea has been filed before Allahabad High Court by this writer, former Uttar Pradesh director-general of police Vibhuti Narain Rai, a man named Ismail who lost 11 family members at Maliana, and a lawyer, M.A. Rashid, who appeared in the Maliana case in the Meerut trial court. The plea has sought a reinvestigation, fair and speedy trial, and adequate compensation to the families of the Maliana victims.

The petitioners have accused police and PAC personnel of intimidating victims and witnesses.

(The writer is a journalist who writes in Hindi, Urdu and English and worked 14 years with BBC World Service. He covered the Meerut riots of 1987 and was an eyewitness to many incidents.)

❈ ❈ ❈

May 1987: Hashimpura Massacre, the Long Road to Justice, and a Poet’s Lament

Wasi Manazir

A few years ago, I came across a mushaira on YouTube where preeminent Urdu poet Bashir Badr recited a rather mournful sher

Log toot jaate hain ek ghar banane mein

Tum taras nahi khaate bastiyan jalane mein

(It takes a lifetime to build a house

yet you remorselessly raze colonies to the ground)

Badr didn’t reveal the context of his sher and I took it as an incisive take on the unfortunate but all too common phenomenon of communal riots in the country. However, I inadvertently came across the context of his sher while reading Vibhuti Narain Rai’s book Hashimpura: 22 May. Rai is a retired Indian Police Services (IPS) officer and was posted in Meerut in 1987. Hashimpura fell in his jurisdiction.

A massacre in two parts

Rai’s book recounts the story of the custodial killing of 42 Muslim men by the notorious Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), an armed force in Uttar Pradesh, on May 22, 1987. The book describes in chilling detail the way Muslim men were rounded up from the Hashimpura locality. The young and healthy among them were handpicked for – what they didn’t know at the time – cold-blooded execution.

One petrifying detail from the ghastly incident is that it was conducted in two parts.

After selecting men to face the brunt of their gunfire, the PAC loaded them into their vans and took off for a canal on the outskirts of Ghaziabad district where they started their killing spree and throwing the dead bodies in the canal only to be interrupted by the headlights of an approaching vehicle. They ceased their act midway and directed the vehicle in another direction.

They took the survivors to another canal, this time in Makanpur village of Ghaziabad, and proceeded to repeat the act that began at the Murad Nagar canal. However, despite the PAC’s best efforts, there were four survivors from the first execution and two from the second.

Rai writes that in the aftermath of the massacre at a meeting attended by then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Vir Bahadur Singh, other politicians and senior bureaucrats there was a suggestion to kill the six survivors as well so as to omit all eyewitnesses to the ghastly events. Better sense prevailed. But the fact that such a suggestion was even uttered in such a responsible company shows that the rot ran deep.

Rai points out the majoritarian bias of the state institutions with right-wing elements dominating the PAC, local police and political leadership. The institutions had their bias backed by the canard of the “savage” Muslim espoused by the residents of Meerut district.

Before the massacre

May 22 didn’t materialise out of thin air. Rai recounts meetings “of all top civil and police officers” on May 21-22 which also saw active involvement of “army officials”– who were posted in Meerut due to the precarious law and order situation at the time amid continuous communal conflagrations. The would-be killers and those tasked with selecting the victims were chosen at these meetings.

S.K. Rizvi, CID officer in charge of investigating the massacre, in a note to the prime minister’s office mentioned, “[…] it may be pointed out that soon after the incident there was some speculation in the press that a brother of a locally posted Major Satish Chandra Kaushik had died of gunshot injuries on 21.5.1987 in Mohalla Hashimpura. It is said that as a consequence of this personal tragedy Major Satish Chandra Kaushik engineered the murder of residents of Hashimpura on the Upper Ganga and Hindan Canals. In this connection Sri Deep Chandra Sharma, father of the deceased, was also examined.”

“[…] the bullet appeared to have come from the direction of the neighbouring Mohalla Abdul Wani. Sri Deep Chandra Sharma also stated that no postmortem was conducted on the dead body of his son Prabhat Kaushik because of the long delay occurring in postmortem period.”

Prabhat Kaushik also happened to be a nephew of a local Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Shakuntala Sharma. Rai had met her twice during the course of research for his book and describes her thus: “If you listen to this 80-year-old woman uninterrupted, she will take you in a unique world of hatred, counter-violence, religious pride, attack, and counter-attack.”

Rai notes that Shakuntala Sharma was writing her autobiography at the time of their meeting, but her entries had stopped on May 21. He is explicit in noting that the plan for the May 22 massacre was set in motion during the May 21-22 meetings. However, botched investigation meant that these meetings were never seriously probed and the masterminds of the massacre were never tried for their crimes.

Several CID reports note Major Kaushik’s presence in Hashimpura when Muslims were being selected for their impending slaughter, however, he was never called for investigation. Rai asserts that senior police officer B.K. Chaturvedi would have been a key witness to the meetings. He was called for polygraph tests, but he never appeared. He never faced consequences for his absence. Major B.S. Pathania, who was the armed forces’ column commander at the time, also failed to appear despite being repeatedly called by the investigating authorities. He didn’t face any consequences either.

Justice delayed and denied

Ultimately, 16 PAC personnel were tried for their alleged crimes and a Delhi court acquitted all of them due to insufficient evidence in 2015. Published in 2015, Rai’s book stops at the acquittal. However, the Delhi high court overturned the trial court’s verdict on October 31, 2018, and sentenced all 16 to life imprisonment.

After the 2015 verdict, Rai muses in the book, “Would I be happy if the accused were convicted?” He answers that the verdict was unfortunate, but not unprecedented as it would have been difficult for any court to convict the accused on the basis of the evidence produced before them. He also questions if there was a miscarriage of justice as a Muslim PAC personnel was also an accused. Rai couldn’t fathom a Muslim’s participation in such an act against his own community. It didn’t add up.

“Being part of this case since the beginning, I can say that investigators tried to protect the accused from day one,” he laments.

A communal mindset among the men in uniform

Rai’s book, which was 28 years in the making, shines a light on numerous dark crevices in the Indian psyche, bureaucratic malpractices, political indifference and media’s complicity: a tale that will sound all too familiar to the victims of the February 2020 pogrom in Delhi.

The Hashimpura massacre was meant as a collective punishment to the Muslims for the death of a high-ranking official’s family member. There was no real intent to find the culprit who shot Prabhat Kumar, instead a decision was taken by the higher-ups to select the healthiest Muslim men, akin to choosing the strongest cattle at a fair, and murder them.

Rai’s book also lays bare the communal mindset in the police ranks. He writes that Hindu localities saw the police personnel as one of their own, while the Muslims had a morbid fear of the men in uniform, never seeing them as allies who would protect them or help them get justice, but officers who would team up with the Hindus to plunder and murder them. It’s telling that in their conversations police personnel referred to the Hindus as “us”, while their Muslim countrymen were “they”.

Mohsina Kidwai was the Congress MP from Meerut at the time, but when the victims approached her offices in Delhi, they were denied any help. Instead they were directed towards Janata Party MP Syed Shahabuddin’s office. He took up their cause for justice.

Media played its part in depicting Muslims as raving lunatics which hardened the Hindus’ stance against them, paving the way for their otherisation and ultimately, massacre. Rai cites headlines from mainstream Hindi dailies to illustrate the media’s role. Amar Ujala (May 28, 1987): ‘Removing PAC will push Meerut to the brink of destruction’; and Dainik Jagran (May 29, 1987): ‘PAC’s timely intervention averted imminent destruction’.

Muslim bureaucrats had their own battles to confront. Rai notes the dilemma of district magistrate Naseem Zaidi and the CID investigating officer S.K. Rizvi as they made their moves. One can guess the tight rope Muslim officials are likely treading in the current sociopolitical climate in the country.

Forced ghettoisation

Badr didn’t lose his house in Hashimpura. Tragedy befell him in another Meerut locality in 1987. The poet was among a handful of middle-class Muslims who moved out of Muslim-majority areas and settled in the newly built locality of Shastri Nagar on the outskirts of Meerut.

In another communal flare up in 1987 in Meerut, rumours spread that Muslims in Shastri Nagar were chopping off Hindu women’s breasts, robbing their houses and setting them alight. The reality was its opposite. In the wake of their destruction in Shastri Nagar, Muslims sold their homes at throwaway prices and moved back to the narrow lanes of their ghettos which they had tried to escape.

Badr took refuge at his friend Ghanshyam Singh Raja’s house in Ghaziabad. His lament has become an elegy for many Muslims’ in the years since.

(Wasi Manazir is an independent writer. Courtesy: The Wire.)