Walk On The Dead

Compensation is a dirty, even dangerous, word in Hashimpura. Can there be any compensation for a life taken, the people ask. The awkward silence is finally broken by Mohammed Shahnawaz (29), who was barely six months old in 1987. “Will the government accept Rs 20 lakh to kill a hundred people?” he asked this reporter.

It’s five days after the acquittal of 16 policemen in the 1987 massacre case where 42 Muslims were killed in cold blood, but Hashimpura is still clearly on edge. There’s anger, bitterness, inconsolable grief. If his father hadn’t been killed by the PAC so senselessly, his life would have been so different, says Shah­na­waz. For one, he wouldn’t have lost out on an education, forced to be the salesman at a small garment shop that he is now.

Several of the affected families pursued the case in court, determined to secure justice one day. Many are today paupers for their pains. Before the ngos stepped in and lawyers started offering their services pro bono, they had to hire them, pay the fees. Then there was the travelling for the hearings, to Lucknow, Allahabad and Delhi. In 18 years, it all added up. Jamaluddin (78) had a flourishing business manufacturing scissors in 1987, all that he has now is a grocery shop that he runs from his crumbling home.

Jamal’s son Qamruddin (22) was killed on that fateful day. He had wanted to become a doctor. The fortunes of the surviving family members also changed dramatically. Brother Riazuddin, 46, a tall man with cropped hair and a long beard, ended up as a tailor. After two stints in Dubai and Saudi Arabia, he’s managed to finally save enough to start a small tailoring business.

From below, Zarina, whose husband and son were killed, with other long-suffering victims who lost family members

Survivors Zulfiqar Nasir and Mohammed Naeem confide that they were offered Rs 20 lakh each to stop pursuing the case. Some strangers, they claim, had visited them at home with the offer. “They were in plainclothes but we have no doubt that they were policemen,” they say. Another survivor, Mujibur Rahman, claims a political leader offered him an unspecified amount if he agreed to go back to his native Bihar. Coercion, in fact, began quite early. While registering the FIR, the policemen had warned the survivors against mentioning anything about the PAC. “They said we would be injected with poison at the hospital,” some of the survivors claimed.

There is some confusion as the survivors wonder aloud if a retrial is possible. At the entry into Hashimpura’s main lane, a banner demanding that the CM and PM initiate a CBI inquiry is already up. There are many conflicting views, some are convinced the UP government will not go in appeal against the acquittal but they themselves have no plans to give up yet. Some believe the Supreme Court could step in yet and give them justice. A few others bitterly recall the role of the then UP chief minister Vir Bahadur Singh. “He sat in the mills’ compound and told policemen that Hashimpura must be taught a lesson,” says Reyazuddin. There’s little proof to back the claim, but many residents of Hashimpura insist it is “common knowledge”.

While the men are eager to talk and vent their ire, the women here are a more stoic lot. Except for a few like Naseem Bano, whose brother Sirajuddin was killed that night. She breaks down frequently while recalling how that night changed the fortunes of the family. Bewildered at the acquittal, she wails, “Who killed my brother?”

Mohammed Shakeel (36) navigates the week-old rubbish near his doorstep, checking in on the workers in his one-room furniture workshop. It’s on the ground floor but he seems oblivious to the human excreta floating by in the open drain running along his house. It’s the only semblance of a drain or sewer in the town, the countrywide Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is obviously years away.

Till 1987, Shakeel’s eldest brother Nayeem (then 23) ran the largest bookbinding business in Hashimpura and headed the family comprising a widowed mother, four brothers and four sisters. Theirs was easily one of the most well-to-do families in the area, owning quite a bit of real estate. The rents itself were quite substantial, says Shakeel as he climbs up the steps to his single-room residence on the terrace. The room inside is dark and the asbestos roof threatens a cruel summer ahead.

Shakeel’s two children crowd around the single chair in the room as he takes out a tattered letter written to the government, asking about the missing Nayeem’s whereabouts. The children peer at their eldest uncle, Mohammed Nayeem, whose passport-sized photo is pasted at the bottom of the letter.

On the dawn of the fateful day, May 22, 1987, 10-year-old Shakeel had tiptoed across the Bulandshahr-Hapur road to Gulmarg cinema, behind which was the milk canteen. It was Alvida Jumma—the last Friday of fasting in the holy month of Ramzan. Shakeel, a third standard student of St Thomas English Medium School, Meerut, should have been looking forward to getting his Eidi after the month-long Ramzan fast. He remembers having stopped at the mouth of the lane clutching an empty milk can tightly to his side while checking to see if there were any security personnel around. The previous days had been like a war zone. There had been vandalism, clashes between the communities and indiscriminate firing by the PAC. That year, there was no Eidi for Shakeel, nor was Eid celebrated anywhere in Hashimpura locality.

Zulfiqar Nasir, a survivor, with his mother

Around 2 pm, the PAC stormed into their house. They said they wanted to take Nayeem to the Bulandshahr-Hapur Road for “questioning by senior officials”. “My brothers and I held on to Nayeem, we didn’t let him go till they assured us he would be sent back,” recollects Shakeel. A few days later, Nayeem’s corpse was found near the Ganga canal (Ganga-nehr) on the outskirts of Muradnagar town, 30 km away. He was among the 42 people gunned down allegedly by the PAC.

The family withered away after that. “My father had died two years earlier and Nayeem used to run the bookbinding business. He collected the rent from the houses we owned, managed the family’s finances and also ran the household,” Shakeel says. His mother could not run the businesses and since the other siblings were too young, she started selling the properties one by one. The children were removed from St Thomas and sent to government schools. Shakeel studied till Class 8 till the family’s dire finances forced him to become a carpenter’s apprentice. “A brother, Imran, has become mentally unstable, which doctors say was caused by the trauma of that day, the other one ekes out a living selling jewellery in Delhi,” he says. The last of their property was sold off to get his four sisters married.

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The Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) was raised by the British as a special force drawn from the Hindu martial castes like the Jats and Rajputs and included other dominant castes too such as the Bhumihars and Tyagis, as also Yadavs. Its somewhat unr­uly reputation is legend. Indeed, in 1973, the Uttar Pradesh PAC had even mutinied against the government. The army was finally called in to quell the rebellion (over a 100 PAC men were killed in the ensuing violence, many hundreds arrested). There are several records of their excesses with a bias favouring Hindus (less than 5 per cent of the force is drawn from the Muslims).

The day the PAC entered Hashimpura, every house of the locality was searc­hed. All the men were rounded up and brought to the road outside Gulmarg Cinema, regardless of their age. Three friends in their twenties—Parvez Ahmed (then 25), Qamruddin (then 22) and Siraj (then 23)—were made to sit on the road. If anyone spoke, they were kicked or poked with the rifles. Siraj and Qamruddin were studying in the government college. “I had just appeared for my MA Economics finals,” Parvez recalls. Siraj was to get married in a fortnight or so and all three were eager to finish their education and apply for government jobs. Qamruddin’s brother Reyazuddin says that the district magistrate was also present. “I don’t remember his full name but everyone called him DM Kaushik. He sat in a jeep laughing with the other policemen while we were being rounded up,” he says.

Around 6:45 pm, some of the men were allowed to break their fast by drinking water from a hand pump on the road and then Parvez was forced into the back of a truck and taken to the Civil Lines police station, beaten mercilessly before being sent to jail. His legs were broken during the torture, the scars are evident till date. His friends were not so lucky. Qamruddin and Sirajuddin were loaded into the last truck around 7:30 pm that night. “By that time, Major Pathania had left and around 20 jawans with PAC badges made us board a yellow truck,” says a survivor of the massacre that followed.

Around 50 of the men, the last batch from Hashimpura, were taken to the Civil Lines police station and kept waiting in the truck. After a while, the truck made its way to a spot on the banks of the Ganga canal just after Mur­adnagar. There the PAC personnel pulled out the men one by one and started shooting them. When the men left in the truck panicked and started shouting for help, the PAC men apparently fired into the back of the truck too. One bullet hit Mujibur Rahman, a migrant powerloom worker from Darbhanga, in the thigh. “They yanked me out and seeing I wasn’t dead, shot me in the chest again,” claims Rahman, showing the twin scars from the bullet, the second being from the exit wound.

A Mohammed Naeem who survived the massacre (no relation to Shakeel) was drenched in someone else’s blood. A bullet had grazed the side of his torso. He lay still, pretending to be dead. Thinking him to be already dead, the PAC jawans threw him onto the east bank of the canal like the other dead Hashimpura men. A little later, Naeem crawled out and ran away to his grandmother’s place in Ghaziabad where he hid for four months.

Mohd Naeem points out the exit wound on Mujibur Rahman’s back

Rahman came to as soon as he hit the water. He waded to the banks of the canal and clutched on to some weeds on the canal’s bank. The ‘encounter’ did not last long. A milk van coming from the opposite direction reportedly made the PAC men leave in a hurry. While 42 died in the massacre, six of them lived to tell the tale. Out of around 60 jawans on duty that day, 19 were accused of murder. Three of the accused died before the 27-year investigation and trial got over. On March 21, ’15, the court judgement accepted that the brutal killings had taken place, but acq­uitted the 16 accused for want of adequate proof.

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Qamruddin’s father, Jamaluddin, and Siraj’s sister, Naseem Bano, attended most of the court proceedings. They are now trying to analyse what went wrong.

“There was no prosecutor for a long time. The case had been handed over to the crime branch central investigation department (CB-CID) of the UP Police and they came and took our statements,” says Mujibur Rahman, one of the survivors.

“Azam Khan (Samajwadi Party MLA from Rampur) built his political career by talking about us. Between ’87 to ’90, whenever there was a rally, he would call us. After he became an MLA, he wasn’t bothered. When we went to meet with Mulayam Singh Yadav, he did not have time for us, though he would insist that the Hashimpura survivors and victims’ families attend his political rallies,” says Naseem Bano.

There have been two rounds of compensations. In the first, Rs 40,000 (20,000 each from the state and the Centre) were given to each of the victims’ families. In the second, the 2002-2007 Mulayam Singh Yadav government handed out Rs 4,60,000 as court-ordered compensation. Many objected to this since it was not distributed equally or was handed to the head of the family, leading to misuse.

Flowing by Jamaluddin’s house is a 10-foot-wide canal that merges into a larger one about 100 metres away from the main lane of Hashimpura. This larger canal separates Hash­impura from Subhashnagar, which is a Hindu-dominated neighbourhood. Jamaluddin says that Hindus also live in Hashimpura. “They have been here since I built my house here 60 years ago and continue to live here. There is no friction between us,” he explains. Reyazuddin says the residents are used to the squalor, which has only worsened since the 1987 killings. Rubbish sometimes gets heaped on the sides waiting, sometimes for weeks together, for the sanitation workers. “All that remains is for ‘them’ to give us some poison to finish us off,” he says.

By Ushinor Majumdar in Hashimpura