Hashimpura Muslim Massacre Trial Reopens: Can Justice
Be Expected?
by Azim A. Khan Sherwani
The criminal proceedings against the accused in the
notorious Hashimpura massacre case have recently
reopened in New Delhi's Tis Hazaree Court. It is a
chilling reminder of the apathy of the state towards
access to justice for Muslims that it has taken
nineteen long years for this to happen. While the
Œmainstream‚ media is awash with reports about the
courts pronouncing judgments in cases related to the
1993 Mumbai serial blasts, it is remarkably silent on
the continued denial to justice of the hapless Muslim
victims of the gory Hashimpura massacre in which
agencies of the state were directly involved. This
fits into a pattern˜Muslim victims of state and
Hindutva violence appear to stand little chance of
securing justice. Nor does the Indian political class
as a whole and the Œmainstream‚ media, influential
sections of which are unabashedly Islamophobic, appear
concerned about their plight.
In May 1987 policemen belonging to the Uttar Pradesh
Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) shot dead 42
Muslim men, most of them youths, including some
minors, from the Hashimpura locality in Meerut. The
massacre occurred in the wake of the communal riots
that broke out in Meerut in April that year after the
Rajiv Gandhi government decided to open the gates of
the Babri Masjid to allow Hindus to worship therein.
The violence was brought under control in a few days.
In May, however, Meerut exploded again.
The violence this time was unprecedented and a massive
force, including the Army, was deployed in the
affected areas. Curfew was imposed and PAC personnel
conducted searches in several Muslim localities in the
city. On May 22, 1987, they booked hundreds of Muslim
youth from Hashimpura, although there was no rioting
in that area of Meerut city. 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.
The horrific incident outraged sections of the media
and Muslim organisations. The People's Union for
Democratic Rights (PUDR) filed a writ petition in the
Supreme Court seeking more compensation to the
families of the victims and an inquiry into the
incident. The Supreme Court directed the state
government to pay an additional compensation of a mere
Rs.20,000 to the families of each of the victims. In
1988, the state government ordered an inquiry by the
Crime Branch Central Investigation Department (CBCID).
During the CBCID inquiry, Sub-Inspector Virendra
Singh, who was in charge of the Link Road Police
Station, related that when he received information
about what had happened he set off towards the Hindon
Canal. On his way, he saw a PAC truck heading back
from the place where the massacre had taken place. He
then tried chasing the truck and saw it enter 41st
Vahini, a camp of the PAC. The gatekeeper on night
duty stopped it. Soon, Vibhuti Narain Rai,
Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad, and Naseem Zaidi,
District Magistrate, Ghaziabad, reached 41st Vahini.
They tried getting the truck traced through senior PAC
officers, but to no avail.
The CBCID identified 13 of the 16 bodies recovered
from the Hindon Canal and filed a charge sheet against
19 PAC personnel under Section 197 of the Criminal
Procedure Code (CrPC). Since most of the accused were
public servants, the state government's sanction under
Section 197 was needed to prosecute them. The
policemen were accused of murder, attempt to murder
and destruction of evidence. 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.
Finally, as a consequence of the pressure of the
Supreme Court, 16 of the 19 accused surrendered before
the court in May 2000, 13 years after the incident.
However, although their bail applications were
initially rejected by the CJM, the accused managed to
obtain bail from the court of the District Judge,
Ghaziabad. While granting bail, the Judge claimed that
since the accused were members of the PAC there was no
chance of them absconding. Since then, the case has
been repeatedly delayed. In 2001, on the petition
filed by the victims before the Supreme Court, the
case was transferred from Ghaziabad to New Delhi as
the conditions there, it was argued, would be more
conducive to the trial. The Supreme Court transferred
the case to the Tis Hazari Court and ordered for day-
to-day hearing. But the case could not be argued
because the Uttar Pradesh government deliberately
delayed the appointment of the Special Public
Prosecutor (SPP). "We are at loss to understand why
the state has been taking this matter so casually and
why we were not informed over all these years the
correct position," a three-Judge Bench, headed by the
then Chief Justice A.S. Anand, lamented while hearing
a petition on the Meerut riots.
The state government had time and again failed to
comply with the directions of the apex court. The
first of these directives was made in 1996 while
hearing a petition drawing the court's attention to
the riots and the massacre in Hashimpura. The
petitioner had demanded to know what the government
had done on the basis of the recommendations of the
Justice CD Parekh Commission, which had been earlier
constituted by the state government to look into the
violence in Meerut. In this context, the Supreme Court
observed:
"We wish to emphasise that any further lapse or
failure to do the needful on the part of the state
would invite not only adverse comments from this court
but may require the personal presence of the Home
Secretary in this court to explain the lapses with a
view also to consider the question of starting
proceedings for contempt of court by the delinquents."
The court put on record that due to the
non-cooperative attitude of the state government in
the matter, "the case still remained in the
preliminary stages", although 14 years had passed
since the filing of the petition.
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.
One of the lawyers representing the Hashimpura
complainants, Vrinda Grover, feels that the victims
have the right to be consulted before the SPP is
appointed. She accuses the UP government of
deliberately causing miscarriage of justice in the
case by trying to create hurdles in the proceedings
and appointing a lethargic and professionally
incompetent SPP. The case has not been properly
investigated and more evidence could easily have been
collected from the site of the massacre.
As the apathetic attitude of the government to the
case of the hapless Muslims of Hashimpura seems to
suggest, it is not just the fanatic Hindutva lobby,
including the BJP that is indifferent, if not hostile,
to the plight of Muslims repeatedly denied justice.
Today, UP is ruled by Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi
Party and a Congress-Left combine rules India. The
present MLA and Minister in UP government from Meerut,
a Muslim elected on the Samajwadi Party ticket, too,
has shown little or no concern to take up the cause of
the victims of the Hashmipura massacre, so supine are
many self-proclaimed Muslim 'leaders', who are
answerable to their parties rather than to their own
constituencies, concerned more about their own
personal political gains than about issues afflicting
the community.
Access to justice in riot and carnage cases is a
distant dream for Muslims in India. The Hashimpura
massacre is a part of a long series of cases of denial
of justice to Muslims. Vibhuti Narain Rai, who was
the Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad, when the
massacre took place, states very clearly in his
pioneering book 'Combating Communal
Conflicts--Perception of Police Neutrality During
Hindu-Muslim Riots in India' that most of the police
personnel posted in Meerut saw the riots as a result
of Muslim "mischief", while ignoring or overlooking
the role of Hindutva groups in fanning them. They
claimed that Meerut had become a "mini-Pakistan"
because of "Muslim intransigence" and that it was
necessary to teach the community a lesson. He argues
for combating such deeply-rooted communal prejudices
among the police and insists on the need for adequate
Muslim representation in the police services. Yet,
communal biases remain firmly entrenched, as reflected
in the State's reluctance to prosecute guilty police
personnel in the Hashimpura trial.
There is a desperate need to scrutinise the role of
public prosecutors who, in many trials related to
communal riots and anti-Muslim pogroms, take a leading
role in facilitating impunity to the accused. In the
wake of the state-sponsored massacres of Muslims in
2002, Gujarat witnessed the same kind of modus
operandi adopted by the state, resulting in mass
acquittals of Hindus accused in heinous cases. This
calls for Muslim organisations to work along with
human rights groups as well as organisations
representing other marginalised communities to carry
on the struggle for justice.
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The writer is based in Delhi and writes on issues
related to human rights & peace building. He may be
contacted on azimsherwani@gmail.com