In 2015, a Delhi trial court concluded that Uttar Pradesh’s Provincial Armed Constabulary had on the night of May 22, 1987, picked up 42 men, all Muslim, from Hashimpura mohalla in Meerut, put them on to a lorry, drove them to a nearby canal, shot all of them and then dumped their bodies in the water. The court acknowledged a massacre, perpetrated by the state, one of the most brazen incidents of extra-judicial killing in independent India’s history. But it also acquitted all 16 police personnel who had been accused in the case, concluding that it did not have enough proof that these men were responsible for those deaths.
On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court reversed this decision, finding all 16 guilty. It sentenced them to prison for the remainder of their lives. To arrive at this conclusion, the High Court had to examine more closely evidence that the trial court had kept out of the case, including a diary featuring the names of all the police personnel who were on the lorry on riot duty that night, which successive state governments had hidden from the courts. This and other registers established in even greater detail that the men had been killed in cold blood by UP’s notoriously anti-Muslim PAC.
The High Court went a step further. It pointed out that the Muslim men who had been picked up were in unlawful custody of the state and that these were effectively custodial deaths. “The present case is yet another instance of custodial killing where the legal system has been unable to effectively prosecute the perpetrators of gross human rights abuses.” the verdict said. “The prolongation of the trial for over two decades, compounded by the endemic systemic delays, have frustrated the attempts at securing effective justice for the victims.” It also clearly acknowledged the fact that the men who were killed were all Muslim, and that this targeting established a motive for the PAC personnel who were supposed to be preventing riots.
In many ways, the Delhi High Court judgment is a complete anomaly. The Indian judicial system has been completely ineffective at providing justice in cases of mass violence, especially when those being accused of it are employees of the state. Indeed, almost as if to drive home this thought, the verdict came on October 31, the day that former prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, and also the anniversary of the 1984 Sikh massacre that followed her murder, which courts are still grappling with.
As many have pointed out, it is cases like Hashimpura and the Sikh massacre – dating back from the time when the Congress was in charge of both the state and the Centre – that reveal the hollowness of the claims of even those sections of Indian society that are supposed to actually care about India’s minorities. Some even see this as more insidious than the Bharatiya Janata Party’s open majoritarianism: the Congress fully expects to haul in minority votes, even as those sections cannot expect justice for such brazen crimes. In the revelation that successive state governments did not submit the diary that eventually offered the clinching evidence until the High Court directed it to, this case is also a reminder that the state protects its own, no matter who is in charge.
The trial court decision, belatedly acknowledging the horror of the state’s actions but acquitting all the men accused for want of evidence, was a damning indictment of India’s judicial system. The delay and difficulty with which the Delhi High Court verdict managed to overturn this seems to reinforce the idea that such crimes will continue to go unpunished. But the High Court verdict can also be seen as a rare corrective, proof that in some cases, justice may actually come even if it is delayed by decades. As India – and Uttar Pradesh in particular – seems poised to return to the communally tense conditions of the 1980s that led to the Hashimpura massacre, one can only hope that the Delhi High Court’s decision acts as both a warning to authorities that otherwise act with impunity and as a beacon of hope to those who seek justice.
Corrections and clarifications: In an earlier version of this article, the date of the massacre was erroneously mentioned as May 22, 1982.