Twenty first anniversary of Hashimpura killings: justice still eludes victims

By Khabrein.info Staff Reporter
Meerut, May 24: Twenty one long years have passed since the ghostly riots devastated Meerut, killing more than 70 people and terrorizing a whole community in this prosperous town in western Uttar Pradesh. Hashimpura killings were not a riot, but a well-calculated massacre of innocent people. The memories haunt the victims even now.
A PUCL report chronicling the Hashmipura massacre says, “What the police did in Hashimpura is something which can never be lived down and the shame of this will continue to haunt any civilised Government. We talked to old persons whose sons and grand-sons were taken away by the police. We met young women whose husbands were taken away and later on they were either missing or their dead bodies were found. The way the residents of Hashimpura were treated was shameful. We were told that hundreds of people were taken out from the locality and asked to sit on the road. One army person asked people over 50 years and less than 10-12 years to get on one side and all the others were dumped into waiting trucks. We were told by one Ahmed, who had got away on the excuse that he had his MA examination that morning, and that 3 of his colleagues, namely, Kamaludin S/o Jamaludin, Sarajudin S/o Sabarudin, Nasim S/o Nasim Ahmed, had been taken away on the trucks. These three had not come back thereafter and the father Jamaludin corroborated this version.Out of 42 only 6 persons are traceable, others have just disappeared. There is no record of these persons with the police. Abdu Bhai the grand father of Zulfikar told that Arif and Karimuddin were also with his grandson. They were arrested together and taken in a truck to Muradnagar and when the truck reached a canal Zulfikar saw Karimuddin being shot by the PAC and thrown in the canal. More than 20 bodies have in fact been found floating in the Ganga Canal."
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.

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