Trapped in the killing field
Time heals indeed but it sometimes drags dark nightmares
into the recesses of the present and the future. That horrifying night in
1987 and the subsequent days are etched on memory as if in stone. It was
something that overpowered the policeman in me and still preoccupies my
thoughts. Looking for the living among blood-soaked bodies strewn around a
canal and in ravines near Makanpur village on the Delhi-Ghaziabad border by
dim torchlight. Making sure that we did not trample on bodies in the dead of
night. The images still stream through my mind like a horror film.
It was about 10.30 p.m. on May 22. I had just returned from
Hapur and, having dropped off District Magistrate (DM) Naseem Zaidi, I
returned home – to the superintendent of police’s residence. As I was
approaching the gate, the headlights of my car hit a frightened and nervous
subinspector, VB Singh, who was then in charge of the Link Road police
station. I could tell that something was seriously wrong in the area under
his jurisdiction. I asked the driver to stop the car and got out.
VB Singh was obviously terrified and unable to describe
events coherently. But his stammered, broken words were enough to shock
anyone. I grasped immediately that jawans of the Provincial Armed
Constabulary (PAC) had killed some Muslims near the canal on 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 to get
clearer details from Singh, I drew up a narrative of the incident:
It was about 9 p.m. when VB Singh and his colleagues sitting
at the police station heard gunshots from near Makanpur; they thought that
there had been an incident of dacoity in the village. In sharp contrast to
today’s Makanpur which is dotted with malls and flashy housing complexes,
the Makanpur of 1987 was a barren sprawl of land. It was along a
single-track dirt road running through this barren land that VB Singh sped
towards Makanpur on his motorcycle with a subinspector and a constable
riding pillion. They had only ridden a few metres down the road when a truck
charged towards them at breakneck speed. If Singh had not swerved off the
road, the truck would have knocked them down.
Even as he was trying to bring his vehicle under control,
Singh looked back to see that it was a yellow truck with the number 41
painted on it and some men in khaki uniforms sitting in the rear. It wasn’t
hard to tell that this was the 41st battalion of the PAC. VB Singh and his
colleagues wondered why a PAC truck was coming from Makanpur at that hour of
the evening and whether this was in any way connected to the gunshots they
had heard. They then continued on their way.
Barely a kilometre ahead, they were confronted with a
terrifying sight. There in the ravines around a canal and a culvert some
distance from Makanpur, they saw people lying in pools of blood, the blood
still fresh, still oozing. From what Singh could see in the light of his
motorcycle’s headlamp, there were bodies lying in the bushes and on the
banks of the canal and even floating in it. The subinspector and his
colleagues tried to figure out what had happened there and could not help
drawing a link between the speeding PAC truck, the gunshots and the bodies.
Leaving the constable behind to keep watch on the spot, VB Singh and the
other subinspector went to the headquarters of the 41st PAC battalion,
located close to his police station on the Delhi-Ghaziabad road. The gate
was closed and despite much explanation and argument, the sentry there would
not open it.
VB Singh then came to me. I knew that what had happened was
truly shocking and could have serious repercussions the next day, given the
fact that neighbouring Meerut district had been burning in communal passions
for the past few weeks and there was an uneasy calm in Ghaziabad. I first
called up DM Naseem Zaidi, who was about to go to bed, and told him to keep
awake. The next call was to my additional superintendent of police and then
to some deputy SPs and magistrates – I asked all of them to get ready
quickly. Forty-five minutes later we were on our way to Makanpur, piled into
seven or eight vehicles, and we reached the spot near the culvert and the
canal within 15 minutes.
Though Makanpur village was just across the canal, no one
from the village had gathered at the spot – they were probably too scared to
venture out. The only people there were police personnel from the Link Road
police station trying to figure out things in dim, inadequate torchlight. I
asked the drivers of our vehicles to turn the vehicles towards the canal and
then switch on the headlights. Although this spread light all around, we
still needed the torches for a closer look, since the bushes were thickly
foliaged. What I saw then was the nightmare that has stayed with me.
Blood-soaked bodies, some deep in the ravines, some hanging from the canal
embankments, partly submerged in water, partly out of it, some floating in
the water: the blood not even dry.
Before we extricated the bodies and counted the dead, it was
crucial to check whether anyone was still alive and needed help. We fanned
out in all directions, using our torches to check the area and calling out
to ask if anyone was alive. There was no response. We even shouted that we
were friends, not enemies, and were there to take the wounded to hospital.
Still no response. Some of us lost heart and sat down on the culvert nearby.
The district magistrate and I decided that there was no
point in our spending more time here; it was necessary to chalk out a
strategy for the next day, given that Meerut was burning in communal fire
and this incident could ignite passions in Ghaziabad the moment these bodies
were taken for post-mortems. So I instructed junior officials to oversee the
extrication of the bodies and wrap up the necessary paperwork while we made
our way to Link Road police station to plan the next day’s security
arrangements. No sooner had we turned to go than we heard someone coughing;
we stopped in our tracks. I rushed towards the canal. We worked the torches
again and called out that we were indeed friends. Then our lights zeroed in
on someone convulsing; he was hanging between the bushes and the canal, half
submerged in water. At first it was difficult to figure out whether 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.
This man, who was later to tell us the bloody and horrific
tale of that night, was Babuddin. Two bullets had grazed him but he had
suffered no serious injuries. In fact, after being helped out of the canal,
he walked to where our vehicles were parked, sitting down to rest briefly on
the culvert along the way.
Twenty-one years later, when I was collecting material for
this book, I met Babuddin at the same place in Hashimpura from where the PAC
had picked him up in 1987. Babuddin told me that it was during routine
searches that a PAC truck picked up some 40 to 50 people and drove off. They
all thought they had been arrested and would soon be placed in custody.
While it seemed rather strange that it was taking so long to reach the jail,
driving through curfew-bound streets, everything else seemed so normal that
they had no inkling of what was in store for them. But as they were
offloaded at the canal and as they were being killed one after another, they
realised why their custodians had been so silent and why they had kept on
whispering in one another’s ears.
The underlying story is a sordid saga of the relationship
between the Indian state and the minorities, the unprofessional attitude of
the police and a frustratingly sluggish judicial system. The cases I
registered at Ghaziabad’s Link Road police station and Muradnagar police
station on May 22, 1987 have encountered several obstacles over the past 23
years and are still struggling in various courts to reach their logical
conclusion.
I pondered how and why a bloody incident like this could
happen. How could someone in his senses kill another human being like this?
Kill an entire group of people? Without any of the enmity that spawns
uncontrollable anger? There are many such questions that confront me even
today.
The answers to these questions lie in the horrifying phase
in which this incident occurred: the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation that had been
going on for nearly a decade and had hopelessly divided the whole of
society. The agitation, which was getting more aggressive with each passing
day, had above all made the Hindu middle class incredibly communal. This
phase saw the greatest number of intercommunity riots since the country’s
partition. Obviously, the PAC and the police could not have remained
insulated from this social chasm. Moreover, the PAC has been perennially
accused of being communal.
I had a long interview with VKB Nair who was the senior
superintendent of police (SSP) during the initial days of the riots in
Meerut. What he distinctly recalled when I met him 23 years later was one
poignant episode. Only a day or two after the riots had started, Nair heard
a commotion outside his house. He came out to find the Muslim stenographer
who worked in his office and his wife and children; they were scared and
crying. They lived in Police Lines and the PAC jawans camping there had been
taunting them continuously. If they hadn’t fled with the help of other
colleagues that day, they could have been attacked and killed. The
stenographer’s family took shelter in the SSP’s bungalow until the riots
subsided. Those days were so horrifying that when some Muslim prisoners were
taken to Fatehgarh jail from Meerut, they were killed by other prisoners and
warders inside the jail.
Coming back to the incident near Makanpur, I was intrigued
by the extreme lengths to which the killers went to achieve their objective.
They pointed their rifles at the chests of unarmed, hapless youngsters and
shot them and even after they had fallen to the ground, kept pumping bullets
into them to make sure that they were dead. All this without knowing them,
without any personal enmity whatsoever! Why? I have spent 23 long years
trying to resolve this conundrum, to understand the psyche of those who did
it. And now that I know the answers, I have got round to writing this book.
However, it is unfortunate that PAC Platoon Commander
Surendra Singh, the hero, or the villain, of the piece, who had ordered a
small team to execute this pogrom, is no longer alive. I will use only
sparingly the notes that I took after hours spent trying to understand his
psyche; I will not use the details I obtained from him so as to avoid any
allegations that I have added or deleted facts to make my point. Similarly,
the then commandant of the PAC’s 41st battalion, Jodh Singh Bhandari, has
also passed away and I will not mention the long interview I had with him
unless it is unavoidable.
In retelling this tragic tale, I fulfil an obligation that
has weighed heavily on my heart ever since May 22, 1987.
Dance of death
Imagine such a close encounter with death that when you open
your eyes to bodies – dead and half-dead – you want to touch them to believe
you are still alive. When molten lead rips through your flesh and flings you
up in the air like a ball of cotton, there is no pain, no fear and no time,
not even for memories to torment you. There are rifles blazing around you
and then there is the cacophony of abusive screams from your killers. When,
with senses numbed, you wait for one of the bullets whizzing past you to
enter your body so that you are tossed in the air for a moment and then
collapse on the ground with a thud.
How would you describe such a death? Especially when you are
seeing your killers for the first time and, though you’ve racked your
brains, you simply cannot figure out why they would want to kill you.
What mental state would Babuddin, Mujibur Rehman, Mohammad
Naeem, Arif, Zulfikar Nasir or Mohammad Usman have been in as they saw their
friends, relatives and colleagues being tossed in the air and then falling
with a thud, convulsing and writhing in pain; their own senses so numbed
that they dared not do the obvious thing: try to run away? All of them made
identical attempts to save their lives. They fell in different directions
after being hit by bullets but the effort to protect themselves from
impending death was the same.
Both these massacres, in which 42 people were forced out of
a PAC truck and killed, took place on the banks of canals and in both
canals, the flow of water was rapid. Every survivor who hit the ground after
being shot at tried hard to feign death and most hung on to the canal
embankments, their heads in water, their bodies clutched by weeds,
pretending they were dead so that no more shots were fired at them. Even
after the PAC personnel had left, they lay still amid water, blood and
slush. They were too scared and numbed even to help those who were still
alive. So much so that even after their tormentors had gone, they assumed
that every person who approached was a member of the PAC gang. Far from
seeking help, they instead held still – particularly if the person
approaching was dressed in khaki.
I met Babuddin some three hours after he was shot at. A
frail, hollow-cheeked boy of average height stood before us, diffident and
scared as a wet-winged sparrow. His trousers were muddied by slush from the
embankment and his shirt was so wet that you could wring a litre of water
from it. Occasional shivers racked his body even in that scorching summer.
But I noticed an uncanny coldness in his voice despite the hint of a
stammer. His ennui was surprising after he had grappled with death at such
close quarters and seen so many strewn all around him. A shiver ran down my
spine at the detached manner in which he recounted his nerve-racking journey
from Hashimpura to Makanpur. When I think back on this now, two decades
later, I realise that when death hounds you, it does indeed scare you but if
it becomes your co-traveller for some time and then lets you alone, you are
filled with a kind of casual indifference.
Babuddin’s clothes were drenched and bore faint crimson
smears. A closer look revealed that his wet shirt stuck to his skin at two
places where the blood had not yet dried. There was a patch on his back and
a reddish-brown stain on his chest, where the bullets appeared to have
grazed him. He looked exhausted and miserable but was able to walk on his
own.
We were heading to our vehicles so we could take him to Link
Road police station but Babuddin had only walked a few steps when his legs
started trembling. We sat him down on the culvert with the help of a police
constable. The strain of hanging on to weeds for hours was now beginning to
tell. Though the monsoon was still far away, the last week of May in Ghaziabad and
surrounding areas is so humid that you are always drenched in sweat. All of
us were tired and drained. Babuddin was the only one who shivered from time
to time.
As I mentioned earlier, I met Babuddin in Hashimpura when I
was collecting material for this book 21 years later. Although he had
forgotten my face, he smiled when we were introduced and reminded me that I
had taken a bidi from a constable and offered it to him as he sat shivering
on the culvert that night; he had refused because he didn’t smoke.
After that, he started talking and, through bouts of
shivering, went on for quite a while. He narrated a tale that was as
shocking as it was tragic and what he said, even in incoherent snatches, was
a veritable nightmare for the eight or 10 officers listening and the 25-odd
government staffers who were present.
In the meanwhile, we – DM Naseem Zaidi and I – had realised
that there was no time to waste. What Babuddin had told us was alarming and
could push Ghaziabad into a communal conflagration. Conferring in hushed
tones, we decided that we must, after getting all the pertinent information
from Babuddin, first register an FIR and then send the bodies to the
mortuary at the crack of dawn even as we ensured that rumours related to the
killings did not have an incendiary impact on the city’s peace. Ever since Meerut had
been caught up in communal passions, we were on high alert to ensure that
Ghaziabad remained insulated from it.
Leaving some police personnel behind, we started walking
towards our vehicles which were parked about 50 to 60 steps away. A group of
10 to 15 personnel walked ahead of us single-file and Babuddin was second or
third in line. He didn’t need any support to walk and refused help. The
scene is as clearly etched on my mind as if it had happened yesterday.
Babuddin and the policemen getting into the vehicles, the grim expression on
DM Zaidi’s face as we walked in funereal procession, all of us dripping with
sweat in that May humidity.
Our cavalcade of half a dozen vehicles reached Link Road
police station in 10 or 12 minutes. There we started questioning Babuddin
again. I sat, along with the district magistrate and four or five other
officials, around a desk in the room of the officer in charge while Babuddin
sat in a chair opposite us. After some initial procrastination, Babuddin
started recounting his tale.
This time he was more comfortable and confident. Perhaps the
passage of time and the realisation that our khaki was different from the
khaki of his tormentors had allayed his fears of death. This time he was
more coherent as he described in great detail how he and others with him had
been picked up and piled into the PAC truck. But one aspect of his narration
remained unchanged: his voice held the same chilling stoicism as before. To
me it seemed to be the very first time someone had described a terrifying
brush with death with such unnerving coldness. And yet this time’s narration
was a lucid, blow-by-blow account.
This time he mentioned one vitally significant detail, a
startling disclosure that shocked us all. He told us that a similar massacre
had taken place earlier that same night when the PAC personnel had killed
and wounded many others who had also been on that truck.
It so happened that after picking them up from Hashimpura,
the speeding PAC truck suddenly turned right, parallel to a canal, about 50
metres off the main road. It trundled along the gravelled road for some time
and then stopped abruptly. The events that ensued at this location would be
replayed in Makanpur an hour later.
Some jawans who were sitting next to the driver jumped out
of the truck. The sound of their shoes hitting the gravelled track made
Babuddin and the others fearful that something terrible was in store for
them. Babuddin had butterflies in his stomach and desperately wanted to
relieve himself but some sixth sense told him it was too late for anything
now. A few of the jawans came to the rear and opened the truck’s shutter. As
soon as it opened, some other jawans who were standing in the rear of the
truck hopped out, leaving a couple of them inside. They seemed to be in a
tearing hurry. The sound of their shoes hitting the stones as they jumped
was frightening. Despite his stoicism, I saw in Babuddin’s face the fear
that must have shadowed the faces of all those who were with him at the
time.
Suddenly, an authoritative voice from outside ordered them
to jump out. Babuddin sensed there was something terribly wrong. He tried to
slink into the depths of the truck to avoid getting out of it. And then all
hell broke loose.
Since Babuddin had his back towards the shutter, he couldn’t
see anything; he could only hear the sound of people getting out of the
truck and then gunshots accompanied by the choicest expletives from those
who were firing. Perhaps the jawans shouted abuse in order to subdue their
own fears. Confusion reigned but it was clear that they were firing at the
Muslims jumping out of the truck. All this between the deafening and
frightened cries for mercy from those who fell to the bullets. Jawans
standing outside ordered their colleagues inside to collar and throw out the
men who were reluctant to jump. Jawans inside the truck prodded their
victims with the butts of their rifles and collared them; those who resisted
were virtually lifted and hurled out.
Each time somebody fell out of the truck, Babuddin heard
gunshots and the painful cries of someone dying; and he caught his breath.
When a strong hand pulled him by the collar, he tried to resist by pushing
himself deeper into the overcrowded space. It was a see-saw struggle.
He felt two hands desperately trying to hold on to him for
support and then slipping away towards the rear. Trembling with fear,
Babuddin looked back and was dumbfounded to see Ayub, a handloom worker who
lived near his home, soaked in blood. Having heard the screams and wails of
those beside him and the sounds of gunfire and the jawans’ abuses outside,
Babuddin, his back still towards the rear, now knew exactly what was
happening. Angered by their failure to get more men out, the jawans were now
firing indiscriminately into the truck, still shouting to their colleagues
to push people out. Babuddin felt Ayub’s grip loosening as someone pulled
him away. When he recounted this tale years after this first narration, his
face reflected the same expression of helplessness as it had then; at being
unable to do anything for his childhood friend one last time.
Babuddin saw people around him being pulled away one by one.
All of them struggled, dragging themselves forward as they were pulled back.
The pressure on Babuddin’s shoulders had eased – perhaps frustrated by his
resistance, the PAC jawans were taking it out on other prey. He had
butterflies in his stomach and every now and then shivers ran through his
body. It was clear to him that if he wanted to remain alive, he should do
everything possible to stay glued to the truck.
Then something unexpected happened, something that neither
hunters nor prey had envisaged. A glimmer of light emerged on the horizon
and gradually grew bigger and sharper. The driver noticed it first and,
looking closely, found that the ball of light he had seen had turned into
two beaming balls. Babuddin also saw this. It was now clear that these were
the headlights of a heavy vehicle. In them Babuddin saw a bright hope for
life. The driver of the truck called out to the PAC jawans but they were so
busy firing at and abusing their victims that they didn’t hear him. He then
shouted profanities at his accomplices and when even this didn’t help, he
began to honk – slowly at first and then continuously.
As the oncoming vehicle closed in, the honking grew louder
and louder but by the time everyone had been alerted, the headlights of the
approaching vehicle had covered the entire scene of the shoot-out. This was
a milk van, returning after collecting milk from a nearby village perhaps.
The light had shattered the magic of darkness and, just as
it scares killers worldwide, the PAC jawans here were frightened by that
light. Two or three of them rushed towards the milk van, brandishing their
rifles. Babuddin, standing in the rear of the truck, could hear the jawans
abusing the driver of the milk van, threatening him and banging their rifle
butts to get him to switch off the headlights. From what Babuddin could
tell, watching the scene through the iron-netted windows of the truck, the
PAC jawans conferred with each other in hushed tones and then some of them
went to the milk van and ordered the driver to reverse his vehicle with the
lights turned off while the PAC truck revved up to drive towards the road.
Then both vehicles stopped. The driver of the PAC truck put his vehicle into
reverse gear and whizzed past the milk van, nearly scraping it as he turned
towards the highway.
In the commotion, the men next to him in the truck were
thrown against Babuddin, doubling his pain. The jawans standing outside
hopped into the truck and they were soon speeding towards the main highway.
Since several people had been left behind after the shoot-out, the crowd in
the truck had thinned, making it difficult for them to keep their balance as
the truck hurtled along the road. With every jolt, people fell over each
other. Hearing the wails of pain after every bump, Babuddin realised that
others in the truck had also been injured. These were the victims who had
resisted getting off the truck earlier and were wounded when the killers
fired into it.
At the only T-junction on that highway the truck turned
sharply towards Ghaziabad without slowing down and as the injured people
fell on top of each other, they screamed in pain. The truck raced along at a
breakneck speed. They were on the Delhi-Dehradun road which would normally
have been bustling with traffic at that hour during the summer. But this
time it was different. Since Meerut was under curfew, only an occasional
vehicle drove past on the highway. The communal riots had obviously had an
impact on neighbouring districts and Ghaziabad in particular was on the
verge of exploding. The situation was further exacerbated by the spread of
frightening rumours. So the cries of the injured people and the abuse
shouted by the PAC jawans would not necessarily have been associated with
the speeding truck. And even if they were, few would pay heed, as it was a
PAC truck travelling at high speed.
At the Meerut tri-junction the speeding truck took a sharp
right turn towards the Hindon river. Having sped past the Mohan Meakin
brewery, it then turned left on to the single dirt track that led to
Makanpur. As on the bumpy road at Muradnagar where the first massacre had
taken place, the truck bumped along this track too as its passengers were
flung on top of each other, howling in pain. In addition to the pain from
their wounds, the victims sensed that the dirt road was leading them into
the jaws of death.
Today concrete jungles cover the area but on that night in
May 1987 this was an empty landscape. On one side of the road lay the Link
Road Industrial Area where most of the factories were closed or sick and on
the other lay a barren stretch of infertile land.
The dirt road leading to Makanpur crossed over a canal and a
culvert. The truck stopped at the canal. Here earlier events were now
repeated. Some jawans jumped out of the truck, opened the shutter and
ordered people to get out. This time nobody did; instead, people tried to
push deeper into the truck; they had fallen silent for a moment but then
they started wailing again. The killers were in an even greater hurry this
time and the screams of their victims seemed to galvanise them further. Two
or three jawans got hold of one of the victims, who struggled vainly to free
himself, and threw him out. Guns blazed and the screaming victim fell into
the canal with a splash that shattered the silence of that humid night. This
happened to several others who were hurled out of the truck; some fell into
the water, others hit the ground with a thud.
By the time it was Babuddin’s turn, the jawans were tired
out – they appeared to be going through the motions of a mundane routine. He
was hit by two bullets; one grazed his back and the other, his chest. He
fell halfway between the canal embankment and thick bushes, his head in
water and the rest of his body stuck in a ravine, but he was alive. On that
night of May 22-23, he would often intone “Allah ka karam hai (by the
grace of god)” as he recounted the tale of his miraculous survival.
After he fell to the ground, Babuddin knew he must pretend
to be dead so that his tormentors did not fire at him again. After the
shoot-out, the killers made every effort to ensure that no one remained
alive. They searched the ravines with the help of a torch for the slightest
sign of life, opening fire at any hint of movement, and kicked the bodies
lying by the canal to make sure no one was alive. Babuddin held his breath
and kept his eyes closed for a long time; he could feel torchlight on his
face but he remained stock-still. Then he heard the truck’s engine rev up
and felt the vehicle’s lights illuminating the killing field. As darkness
fell, and with the vehicle now gone, he opened his eyes to see a pitch-dark
area shrouded in deafening silence. He was too scared to move and pretended
to be dead if he heard the faintest sound. That is why it took us so long to
impress upon him that although we wore khaki too, ours was different from
the khaki of those who had shot and tortured them earlier.
It did not take us long to identify the site of the
shoot-out that had taken place before the one near Makanpur, since most of
us, including the district magistrate and myself, often travelled on the
Meerut-Ghaziabad route. We surmised that the truck must have first turned
towards Gang canal, which cuts across the road after Modinagar, just before
Muradnagar. I immediately spoke to Rajendra Singh Bhagor, the officer in
charge of Muradnagar police station, on a wireless set at the Link
Road police station. Our suspicion proved correct – the earlier incident had
occurred in the same manner as the one near Makanpur and exactly as Babuddin
had described it. The only difference being that Babuddin was not aware that
there were three survivors at the earlier spot who had been brought to
Muradnagar police station.
