Delhi, 1984 - Hate Rules The Capital

THE ASSASSINATION of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards sparked a massive carnage of the capital’s Sikh community. For three days police stood mute to the butchery and Congress leaders led the mobs on the streets. “When a big tree falls, the earth shakes,” declared Gandhi’s son and successor Rajiv. Ten inquiry commissions and three special courts later, only eight of the 126 cases resulted in conviction. Of these, some were overruled or commuted. In effect, the judiciary found three people guilty of killing 3,000 Sikhs. The depositions made before the GT Nanavati Commission reveal that while the majority of the police personnel tacitly supported the rioters, a section of them actively participated in the rioting. Shoor Veer Singh Tyagi, the SHO at Kalyanpuri, was charged by various commissions with abetting the rioters but he escaped unpunished. The Nanavati Commission also indicted Congress politicians Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and HKL Bhagat and Police Commissioner SC Tandon. The Central government rejected the charges, saying one can’t be punished on the ground of “probability”.

Meerut, 1987 - Police Terror

The Hindu Archive

THE SIXTH MAJOR Hindu-Muslim riot in two decades in Meerut erupted in May 1987. In the midst of month-long rioting in which 12 people had already been killed, policemen belonging to the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) surrounded the Hashimpura locality, which was dominated by weavers from the Muslim Ansari community. They rounded up over 320 people and took them away. Another 42 young men were separately taken, three of whom reached separate police stations a day later and said the PAC men had shot dead their fellows. Around 30 bodies from among these 42 men floated up a nearby canal. The incident blew the fuse in the strained air and 350 people were killed in two month-long fighting that was subdued only by a 13,000- strong Army detachment.

The Hashimpura killings became the focus of the violence, even as cases against rioters meandered and closed. A CB-CID inquiry came out with its report in 1994 and indicted over 60 PAC personnel of all ranks, but the Congress government in the state gave sanction for cases against only 19 constables. Chargesheets were filed in a Ghaziabad court in 1996, but the court’s summons and 23 warrants between 1997 and 2000 were simply ignored. The Supreme Court transferred the case to Delhi in 2002. The UP government’s public prosecutor couldn’t appear on the first hearing of the sole survivor’s testimony, and was fined Rs 5,000. The case is being heard at Delhi’s Tis Hazari court since May 2006

Bombay, 1992 - City Of Nightmares

Sudhakar Olwe

THE BABRI MASJID demolition set off a pogrom against Muslims led by the Shiv Sena through December 1992 and January 1993. Around 1,800 were killed in violence spread over two phases. Three years after it was set up, the BJP-Shiv Sena government wound up the Justice Srikrishna Commission in 1996, only to reinstate it later under public pressure. The Srikrishna panel examined 502 witnesses and submitted its report in February 1998. Of the 17 police officers who were formally charged in mid-2001, none has been arrested. In April 2003, former city police commissioner RD Tyagi and eight serving police officers accused of killing nine people were discharged by a Mumbai sessions court. Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray was among several leaders indicted by the commission, but successive governments have refused to take action.

Bhagalpur, 1989 - Blinding Justice

Alok Jain

ON OCTOBER 22, 1989, a shilanyas procession for the Ram Janmabhoomi temple wound its way through Bhagalpur, and soon altercations and incidents of stone pelting had turned into one of the bloodiest riots of independent India. In violence spread over a month, over a thousand people had officially been slain, most of them Muslims. In Logain village, 116 Muslims were massacred, buried in a field and cauliflowers grown over their bodies. An army major herded 100 men, women and children to a house in Chanderi village and posted the police for their protection. The next morning, he found the house empty. Four days later, 61 mutilated bodies were found in a nearby pond, among them a live Malika Bano whose right leg had been chopped off. By the time a single-member inquiry commission got around to issuing its first public notification, its term had expired. Most of the accused were set free for want of evidence. In July this year, 14 of the 24 accused in the Logain case were given life sentences. Six of the accused had died during the course of the trial. Most cases are still pending in courts.

Ahmedabad, 1969 - Fratricide

IT WAS in 1969 that Ahmedabad’s social fabric was irreparably torn. Concentrated between September 18 and 30, the violence was triggered by a Jagannath temple procession running into the Urs celebration at a dargah. But the ground had been prepared months before. In December 1968 MS Golwalkar addressed the biggest RSS rally in the city. In March 1969, a Superintendent of Police was accused of desecrating the Quran. Muslims had taken out a rally against Israel’s desecration of the Al-Aqsa mosque. The Jan Sangh had set up a Hindu Dharma Rakshak Samiti to carry out propaganda work, but whose members served as the foot soldiers in the attack against Muslims. The P. Jaganmohan Reddy Commission of Inquiry found the Muslims to be the chief victims of the riots. The official casualty figure in Ahmedabad was 660, of which 430 were Muslims. But while the commission blamed the police for being “infirm and indecisive”, it refused to “countenance the suggestion” that the police did so deliberately or on the directions of the Congress (O) government.