By Saiyed Danish, TwoCircles.net,
Shamli: Even after being rapped by the Supreme Court for deaths of children, the UP government’s brazen refusal to recognize deaths of 50 children in various camps exposes the level the government can stoop down in order to cover up the truth about the existence of mass graves in the various camps situated in the district.
There is not a single camp where children deaths have not taken place but there is no mention of it by any medical representative appointed by the UP government to look after the sick victims living in the camp.
Nearly 4500 Muzaffarnagar riot victims and 700 families are languishing in hundreds of camps at Malakpur.
In fact, the Director-General U.P. Health Ministry Dr. A. S. Rathore, in one of his rare visits to the Malakpur camp, went on to claim that he had precise information about the deaths in the camps but failed to acknowledge the number of graves in the very camp from which he was making his lofty claims.
Even a layman could tell that the 16 small graves of infants in the premises of Malakpur camp are fresh. But even that record was nowhere to be found in the “updated list of dead persons in families” as claimed by Dr. Rathore. He seemed to be so obsessed with the official versions that even after visiting the graves he denied the possibility of children dying due to severe weather conditions.
If the state of naked apathy on the part of the Director General was not inhumane yet, the Chief Medical Officer of Shamli district Dr. Lokesh Kumar Gupta’s arrogant behaviour made up for it at Sunaiti camp where he did not even step down from his car to listen to the antagonized riot-victims. It is because of such slip-shoddy visits that the real problems of victims are going unheard.
Sunaiti relief camp, which is about 4 km away from the Malakpur camp, is second in a row of camps in with unregistered child deaths in the district. 6 infants have died in this camp due to cold weather but the uniformity, with which the health officials have been denying such facts elsewhere, was maintained by them at Sunaiti camp also.
“My child died by a snake bite,” said Akbari, the mother of Saadil who succumbed to the snake bite. Five other infants, namely Fatima (4 years), Firdaus (6 days), Zoya (5 years), Firoz (20 days), Umar (9 days) also died in the same camp.
The third camp with graves of children in Shamli alone is Nurpur-Furqan camp situated not far from Sunaiti and Malakpur, where 1300 riot-victims have camped. So far six children died here.