On twentieth anniversary justice still eludes Hashimpura massacre victims

By Khabrein Staff Reporter
www.khabrien.info
Meerut, May 23, Zulfiqar Nasir is a married man with a cracking wife and children, but the memories of the black day of 1987 are still fresh as if it happened yesterday. The mere mention of that day sends shiver down his spine. Nasir was 15-year-old and he remembers how the PAC personnel had eliminated Muslims in his locality following communal riots in Meerut.
On that tragic day, May 22, the PAC personnel cordoned off Hashimpura -- located in the middle of Meerut – and picked about fifty innocent Muslim men between the age group of 70 and 10 from three out of four lanes of the locality. The fourth lane inhabited by Hindu families was left. Nasir was one of them. Nineteen PAC personnel, under platoon commander Surinder Pal Singh, took about 50 Muslim youths, most of them daily wage labourers and poor weavers, in a PAC truck from Hashimpura to the Upper Ganga Canal in Murad Nagar, Ghaziabad, instead of taking them to the police station. They shot them dead in cold blood and threw their bodies into the canal. The PAC personnel then drove ahead in their truck to the Hindon Canal in Makanpur and shot dead several other Muslim youths they had taken with them. Two of the persons who survived the Hindon Canal massacre and managed to escape lodged an FIR at the Link Road Police Station. One of the four others who managed to escape the massacre at the Upper Ganga Canal filed an FIR at the Murad Nagar police station.
An inquiry was ordered by the government after a lot of pressure from Muslim organizations and other human rights organizations. The charge sheet was filed before the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM), Ghaziabad. The CJM issued summons to the accused, asking them to appear before the court. When the accused did not appear before the court, bailable warrants were issued six times between January 1997 and February 1998. Later, non-bailable warrants were issued 17 times between April 1998 and April 2000. But the accused evaded the summons and warrants.
In February 2004, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the Director-General of Police (DGP) and the Chief Secretary of UP to appear before it in person. Initially, the Special Public Prosecutor (SPP) appointed by the UP government took no interest in discharging his duties. The victims were clearly dissatisfied with his functioning and so he was removed after they complained. In November 2004, the government appointed Surinder Adlakha, a less than mediocre lawyer, as SPP. Recently, on 15th June 2006, when the case started in the Tis Hazari Court, the Additional Session Judge, N.P Kaushik, wrote very strong words against the ill- preparedness of the SPP.
Zulfiqar nasir says, “it was just by chance that I survived as they had checked all the people fired at the place and anyone found alive was again fired at. They then dumped the bodies in the nearby Hindon canal”. Nasir was able to get hold of a bush on the bank of the river. “I then hid inside that bush while the blood was streaming out of my body like a water tap. Pain was as severe as death might be. But I was just able to hide myself. The PAC men were there till the body floated to safe distance,” he said.
“Now it looks like I spent a whole eternity hiding inside those shrubs,” recollects Nasir. “I came out of the hiding only when I ensured that they had left the place believing that no trace of their massacre was left,” he said. Bodies were later found near another bridge on the Hindon River and then fished out.
Twenty years later, justice has evaded victims of Meerut riots. Life has been arduous for the survivors of the riot that had left more than four thousand people dead and many homeless and destitute in Meerut.
Hajira, whose husband and son were killed by the PAC men, has lost her mental balance. “Life for me ceased on the day when they were taken from the house and then murdered,” she said.
Her relatives say that they have not seen her happy since then. She fears to step out of the house, they added. Her case is the just a tip of the iceberg. There are several women are still expecting their men, son and brothers to return. There is no one to take care of them. The government and administration have done nothing to address their plight.
There are several Hajiras, says Ghufran Alam, now a middle ranking Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) leader. He too suffered enormously. Compensation announced by the government has eluded most of the victims.
The PAC men at the bank of Hindon canal killed Rashk-e-Jahan’s husband. They took 18-year-old Ghufran to Fatehgarh prison. He said that there were almost fifty men on the same vehicle that carried him to the prison. Ironically, till date no action has been taken against PAC men.
“Cases are continuing in different courts but without any aim to punish the people involved in worst one of the worst communal massacres, says Maulana Yamin. He is among the few people who have been relentlessly pursuing the case from session courts to high court and Supreme Court. Justice is still a pipe dream.
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