BackBook excerpt: Hashimpura 22 May
Last year 16 UP policemen who were accused of killing 42 Muslims were acquitted. The then superintendent of police of Ghaziabad district gives his version of the massacre he was called in to investigate
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It was around 10.30 p.m. and I had just returned from Hapur. After dropping the district magistrate, Nasim Zaidi, at his official residence, I reached the residence of the superintendent of police. Just as I reached its gates, the headlights of my car fell on the frightened and nervous sub-inspector, V.B. Singh, who was then in charge of the Link Road police station. I could guess something terrible had happened in his jurisdiction. I asked the driver to halt the car and got out.
Singh seemed too scared to explain coherently what had happened exactly. Even then, his string of broken words was enough to shock anyone. I could make out that the jawans of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) had killed some people, most likely Muslims, near the canal crossing the road leading to Makanpur. Why were they killed? How many were killed? From where were they picked up? All this was not known. After several attempts of trying to get Singh to be more coherent about the details, this is what I gathered about the incident: It was around 9.00 p.m. when V.B. Singh and his colleagues sitting at the police station heard gunshots from near Makanpur and they thought there were some dacoits in the village.
Today, Makanpur is dotted with malls and flashy housing complexes, but the Makanpur of 1987 was a barren sprawl of land which had a single-track dirt road passing through it. Singh turned his motorcycle towards that track, with another sub-inspector and a constable sentry riding pillion. They had barely travelled a few metres down the road when they spotted a truck driving towards them at breakneck speed. If Singh had not swerved his motorcycle off the road, the truck would have knocked them down. Just as he was trying to control his vehicle, Singh looked behind at the yellow coloured truck with ‘41’ written on it and some men in khaki uniform sitting at the rear. It was not difficult for professional policemen to figure out that the vehicle was from the 41st Battalion of the PAC. Wondering why a PAC truck was on that road at that hour of the night and if it had any connection to the gunshots they had heard, they proceeded towards Makanpur.
They must have driven just a kilometre further when Singh and his colleagues saw something very scary. Just short of Makanpur, there were bodies strewn in a pool of blood in the ravines around the canal. The blood was still oozing out of the bodies and was slowly seeping into the ground. From what Singh could see from the glow of his motorcycle’s headlights, there were bodies lying in the bushes, on the canal banks and floating in the water as well. It did not take the sub-inspector and his colleagues long to link the speeding PAC truck with the gunshots and the bodies in the canal. Singh and the sub-inspector left for the headquarters of 41st Battalion of the PAC on the Delhi–Ghaziabad road, leaving the constable behind to guard the spot.
The gate of the headquarters was shut and, despite Singh’s explanations and arguments, the sentry posted there refused to open the door. Singh then came to me and I could make out that the incident was frightening and could lead to serious repercussions the next day. Communal passions had flared up in the neighbouring Meerut district in the past few weeks and there was an uneasy calm in Ghaziabad.
I called up the district magistrate, Nasim Zaidi, first, who was just about to go to bed, and requested him to stay awake. The next call was to my additional superintendent of police Kamlendra Prasad, and then I called some deputy superintendents of police and magistrates—I asked all of them to quickly get ready. I knew the commanding officer of 41st Battalion, Jodh Singh Bhandari, lived in the town as his official residence was still under construction in the unit campus. So a message was also sent to him to join us. In the next forty-five minutes, riding in some seven or eight vehicles, we were on our way to Makanpur. We reached the spot near the culvert and the canal in barely fifteen minutes. Makanpur village was just across the canal, but nobody was around—people were probably too scared to venture out. By this time some police personnel from the Link Road police station had reached the spot and were trying to scan the area with their dim torches. I asked the drivers to turn the vehicles towards the canal so the beam of the headlights could help us. The whole area was now lit up, but we still needed the torches to take a closer look into the thick foliage around the canal. What I saw there was a nightmare that has stayed with me till date. There were bodies covered in blood—some in the ravines, some hanging precariously from the canal embankments, some partly in the water, some partly outside and some floating in the water. The blood had not even dried from the corpses.
Before counting the dead and extricating the bodies, we needed to first see if anyone was still alive and required help. We fanned out in all directions, shining our torches and calling out loudly hoping to find survivors. There was no response. We even shouted out reassuringly that we were friends, and not enemies, and were there to take the wounded to the hospital. Still, there was no response. Disappointed, some of us sat on the culvert nearby.
The district magistrate and I felt there was no point spending time there as the need of the hour was to chalk out a strategy for the next day. This was especially crucial given the high communal tension in Meerut district that could potentially flare up passions in Ghaziabad the moment these bodies were sent for post-mortem the next day. So I instructed the junior officials to look after the extrication of the bodies and wrap up the necessary paper work, while we proceeded to the Link Road police station to plan the next day’s security arrangements.
The moment we turned around to leave, we heard someone coughing. We immediately stopped in our tracks and rushed towards the canal. We worked the torches again and called out that we were indeed friends. We could take him to the hospital . . . he must speak. Our lights zeroed in on a convulsing figure hanging between the bushes and the canal, half immersed in the water. At first, it was difficult to figure out if he was alive or dead. He was shivering with fear and it took us a long time to convince him that we were there to help him. This was Babudin who would go on to tell us the bloody and horrific tale of that night. Bullets had brushed his flesh in two places, but he had no injuries. In fact, after being helped out of the canal, he briefly sat on the culvert, rested there and then walked down himself, without any help, to where our vehicles were parked.
Twenty-one years later, while collecting material to write this book, I met Babudin at the same place in Hashimpura from where the PAC men had picked him up in 1987. He had forgotten my face, but the first thing he recounted when I introduced myself was that I had taken a beedi from a constable to give him when he sat shivering on the culvert that night. He had politely refused as he was a non-smoker.
Babudin told us that during the routine searches, a PAC truck picked up forty to fifty people and drove them away. They all thought they had been arrested and would soon be lodged in some police lock-up or jail. While it appeared rather strange that it was taking them so long to reach the jail from the curfew-bound streets, everything else looked so normal that they had no inkling of what was lying in store for them.
But when they were asked to step out at the first canal and the PAC men started shooting them, one after the other, that they understood why their custodians had been so silent and why they kept whispering into each other’s ears.
The story is a sordid saga of the relations between the Indian state and minorities, the amoral attitude of the police and a frustratingly sluggish judicial system. The cases I lodged in the Link Road and Muradnagar police stations on 22 May 1987 met with formidable obstacles for more than two decades and could reach their logical conclusion only after twenty-eight years.
How and why did bloody incidents like this happen? How could someone just kill fellow human beings like this? Especially, so many people, when there was no trace of any enmity which could spawn such uncontrollable anger?
The answers to these questions lie in the horrifying period when this incident occurred. It was nearly a decade since the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation had hopelessly divided the entire nation. The agitation that started in the late 1970s, and was getting more aggressive each day, had driven the Hindu middle-class towards communalism. The maximum number of inter-community riots post Partition took place during this phase. It was obvious that the PAC and the police could not have remained insulated from this social chasm for long.
Vibhuti Narain Rai is a novelist and was posted as Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad district, when the Hashimpura massacre took place.
Excerpted from Hashimpura 22 May—The Forgotten Story of India’s Biggest Custodial Killing (By Vibhuti Narain Rai, translated from the Hindi by Darshan Desai, 180 pages, ₹ 399) with permission from Penguin Random House.
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