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Tag: Bhagalpur

  • The Killing Fields of Bhagalpur

    By Omar Afzal

    The massacre of innocent Muslims in Bhagalpur City and surrounding villages in the last week of October 1989 may be added to a very short list of mind-boggling tales of human savagery. The grim details are still not fully known and perhaps the full story may never see the light of the day.

    The local administration has put the casualty figure to a 1,000 dead and several thousand uprooted. Unofficial estimates are as high as 3,000 dead, a thousand unaccounted for and more than 50,000 homeless. The number of injured may be around 8,ooo.

    The medieval atrocities of Genghiz Khan pale in comparison to what the Hindu mobs did in several villages of the Bhagalpur District. A frenzied mob swooped on the village in the Jagdishpur block, killed everyone it could and buried them in a field. To cover its heinous acts, it leveled the mass graves and planted vegetables over them. In Chakjhoura Village, dead bodies and human limbs were found hidden in a paddy field. The corpse-filled ponds of Chanderi were perhaps the ultimate in human barbarism. As an Indian journalist put it, “a monster stalks Bhagalpur.” The most shocking aspect of the anti-Muslim terror in Bhagalpur is the connivance of police, army and local administration. The High Court in Patna, capital of the northeastern state of Bihar, has asked army Maj. G.P.S. Virk to explain why he left 100 Muslims, mostly women and children, of Chanderi Village in the protective custody of the local police and failed to report when he found them “missing” the next day.

    The Bihar Military Police is also said to have helped the killer Hindu mobs. Not only that Hindu policeman often turned their backs at the killings, they also killed and maimed people when they were handed to them for safe keeping. After a home-made bomb was thrown at the police party, allegedly by Muslims, the police went on a looting rampage. Some uniformed policemen are reported to have set fire to a mosque. A commander of the BSF could not ‘believe his eyes when he saw Hindu policemen standing on both sides of a narrow lane clobbering Muslim men, women and children, who were rescued from riot-affected areas. Because of the complicity of police, military and local administration, some of the most brutal killing were not reported until recently. Bhagalpur police are notorious for violence. In 1980, several Bhagalpur policemen were arrested for acid-blinding four defendants who were under trial.

    Not has the Western media not been interested in doing investigative reports on the Bhagalpur killings, the Indian media, has not been fair to the victims either. Without exception, Indian newsmen have caned the anti-Muslim violence “communal riots” and some have shied away from saying that the victims were Muslim. Instead they have referred to them as members of a “minority.” Why are they ashamed of calling a spade a spade, or of blaming the police for complicity? Because it would tarnish India’s image as the land of “Ahimsa?’5 (nonviolence).

    The writer,’ who works at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, was in India recently.

  • The Cry for Justice in Bhagalpur

    The Cry for Justice in Bhagalpur

    That it took India several months to fathom the depths of anti-Muslim bestiality in Bhagalpur tells something important about its attitude towards the country’s largest religious minority.

    Although some estimates put the death toll in Bhagalpur and 150 adjoining villages at 1,500, an accurate figure may never be known. Because of police complicity and official coverup in the massacre, many mass graves may never be “discovered” and bodies from ponds and wells never pulled out. Indeed, the ones that were dumped in the River Ganges can never be redeemed. One report has it that the local police poured chemicals in a well, which contained bodies of the victims, to expedite decomposition.

    The more than 10,000 Muslim refugees who have lived to tell their harrowing tales have once again found that getting justice in India is next to impossible. The thriving Bhagalpur Muslim community that once was, has been reduced to gutted houses, mosques, and shops. The living has not only to mourn their dead, but also to find a haven where they can nurse their psychological wounds and build their lives far from the reach of vicious Hindus. Whether they can find such a refuge in India, their ancestral land, is a matter of open debate.

    The immediate cause of the Bhagalpur massacre was Hindu provocation and efforts to bait Muslims into the Babari Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi controversy in Ayodhya. That dispute is far from settled and may erupt into a civil war if New Delhi continues to pander to the fanatic Hindus. In Bhagalpur, the murderers not only violated Muslim lives and properties but also the Indian Constitution, which guarantees basic freedoms to all citizens.

    Bhagalpur cries for justice. But justice requires more than cosmetic changes and official statements. The new government in New Delhi, which is strongly represented by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has to rise above party politics to deliver what it must. It is an ironic parallel that Prime Minister V.P. Singh and his predecessor, Rajiv Gandhi, came to power in the wake of the butchering of a minority: Muslims in Mr. Singh’s case, and Sikhs in Mr. Gandhi’s.