By TwoCircles.net staff reporter,
Meerut: Twenty-one years after Hashimpura massacre in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, families of the victims and survivors are yet to get proper compensation and the policemen involved in the killings are yet to be punished.
Some members of the state Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) allegedly shot dead 42 innocent Muslim men in 1987.
The Hashimpura massacre occurred during the communal riots that broke out in Meerut on 22nd May 1987. Apparently, the immediate provocation was the Rajiv Gandhi-led Central government’s decision to open the Babri Masjid for worship by Hindus. In April several areas of Meerut city were affected by communal violence during the Muslim festival of Shab-e-Barat. But the Congress government in U.P., headed by Vir Bahadur Singh, withdrew the security forces soon after the violence subsided. Meerut exploded again, and the state government was caught unaware. Thousands of people, incited by inflammatory speeches and slogans barricaded the national highway and burnt factories, shops, houses, vehicles and petrol pumps.
Curfew was imposed and PAC personnel conducted searches in several Muslim localities in the city. On 22nd May, they picked hundreds of Muslim youths from Hashimpura, though there was no rioting in that area of Meerut city. Nineteen PAC personnel, under platoon commander Surinder Pal Singh, allegedly took 50 of the arrested youths, most of them daily wage labourers and poor weavers, in a van to the Upper Ganga canal in Murad Nagar, Ghaziabad, instead of taking them to police station. They then shot some of them, one by one, and threw them into the canal. Four of those shot escaped and one of them filed a first information report (FIR) at the Murad Nagar Police Station. The remaining men were taken in a truck to the Hindon Canal in Makanpur and shot. Two of the persons who were shot here survived and lodged an FIR at the Link Road Police Station.
On the 21st anniversary of the police brutality, Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) yesterday handed over a memorandum to the President of India through the District Magistrate in Meerut. IUML has demanded compensation and pension to the family of victims and action against the guilty PAC police officials. The memorandum has also demanded compensation to the victims like the one given to the victims of the anti-Sikh riot of 1984 and employment of one member from the family of each victim in government sectors.
Former corporator Maulana Yamin, who brought the issue in the court, is no more. After his death in 2007, his son advocate Junaid is handling the case.