THE incident at Moradabad on 13 August 1980 was a calculated, cold-blooded massacre of Muslims by a rabidly communal police force which tried to cover up its genocide by making it out to be a Hindu-Muslim riot and the then Congress government did an incomplete inquiry. The investigation report, which became public after 43 years, claimed that the riots in Moradabad were organized by Muslim League to gain Muslim votes. The question is, this report was suppressed? In reality, it is BJP’s another Political Manoeuvre to put forward the four-decades-old Moradabad Riots Report to Sway the 2024 Elections.
Men of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) opened fire on about 40,000 Muslims while they were at their Eid prayers. More than 50,000 Muslims gathered at the Eidgah (where Eid prayers are held) of Moradabad. 60% of this city of five lakh people is Muslim and Eid obviously is one of the major celebrations of the town. The forces of ‘law and order’ unleashed their fury on thousands of Muslims who had come to offer prayers on their day of joy and celebration; hundreds of Muslims died, including many children, in the massacre and the stampede. It was clearly a case of police brutality.
During the khutba, a pig wandered into the namaz. The dispute between the people praying and the policemen arose when the Muslims asked the policemen how the pig (unclean animal that would completely destroy the sanctity of the prayer) had wandered in despite the presence of the police. The policemen told the Muslims that it was not their job to prevent pigs from disturbing the namaz. But if a bunch of communal Muslims took a cow in front of a temple while a huge crowd had gathered for prayers and started to slaughter it, would it be the job of the police to stop this stupidity or not? A pig during Namaz is just as provocative.
Within the 5 minutes of khutba, the police had opened fire. Imam and the local Congress (I) MLA, Hafiz Mohammad Siddique, who was there also appealed over and over again to the police to stop. But they had gone berserk. The vultures that inhabit every community are only waiting for an incident like the one that happened at Moradabad to take place. This will be their source of sustenance for a long while. Time and distance destroy the truth of any event: embellishments will make the Moradabad massacre into a weapon for all kinds of motivated forces.
The police told many lies to cover up their criminal assault on a defenceless congregation but these lies fall to pieces under scrutiny. After the stampede had started, the Muslim youth who saw how the police were behaving, loosened the top layer of bricks from one of the walls and started hurling them at the police. Many Muslims who were killed cannot be traced: the police have no ‘record’ of the bodies. Indira Gandhi herself admitted that the administration was in bad shape. She went on to blame the Janata and the Lok Dal Governments for this. Opposition said the Congress (I)’s use of the police for political purposes accounted for the extraordinary arrogance of the police.
There was no RSS involved; and despite all the efforts of the police to call this a Muslim League or Razakar instigated riot, they have not succeeded in convincing too many people. Creating communal trouble is not too difficult in such an atmosphere, the banner headline in one important national English newspaper which said that four Border Security Force (BSF) jawans had been killed, obviously by Muslims. The BSF immediately denied the claim.
Some journalists did not have even that to commend them and went along with police efforts to use ‘respectable’ media to transfer the lies to the rest of the country. A journalist reported that 500 armed Muslims had come from Sambhal and attacked the police Hq. Similarly, the police tried to give the impression that there were a great number of Hindu victims too, so it was a communal riot.
The PAC, which in the past has, already been condemned by inquiry commissions for partisanship, now has given Muslims one more very good reason to distrust it. Cry of the minority must always compete against the cacophony of vested interests which want to either suppress it or exploit it.
This massacre was a harsh indictment of ‘secular’ and Left politics. The Muslims of India have been facing various atrocities in the hands of State till date; 1964 Kolkata riots, 1983 Nellie massacre, 1987 Hashimpura massacre, 1989 Bhagalpur violence, 1992 Bombay riots, 2002 Gujarat pogrom, 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, 2023 Haryana violence are different episodes of the series. The police had given a typically brutal, awful demonstration of their prejudice. This is why the minorities have so little faith in State institutions & organizations like the PAC.
—The writer has remained associated with the Institute for Strategic Studies and ISPR.
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