BHAGALPUR: Half of Chanderi will never come back. Many of its people are dead, many are missing and many never want to see their village again.

A communal fire first burnt in Chanderi on October 26, when three huts were gutted. The Army rescued about 100 people and left them in a large house guarded by the police. (According to BBC over 1000 Muslims have been killed in a virtual genocide in Bihar).

Next morning the Army men found the house burning, the policemen missing and a trail of blood and tattered clothes leading to the village pond. And in the pond, were bruised and battered bodies.

The bodies are still turning up. The stench is everywhere in the pond, in the fields and in the village wells. The police who deserted their post when the attackers came claimed they have found only ten including four on Friday. The Army men put the toll between 20 and 30 and residents reel off names of at least 60 of their relatives who are dead. But numbers have ceased to matter in this tortured city.

“I thought I would go mad. I felt like crying”, said a soldier who saved the people on October 26 and came back to find them dead on October 27.

He said he was patrolling Chanderi on October 26 when headway mob running. Suspicious, he walked into the village and found three huts shouldering. Three people had already been killed and others were scurrying for shelter.

“It took a long time to console the victims. All of them huddled together in a house owned by a man named Minnat Ali.

Finally, when everything was quiet, I called the SHO and told him to look after those people”, said the Armyman.

Next morning, carrying medicine and food for the people he had rescued, he walked into a ghost town. The house where the people had spent the night was empty. A small voice suddenly said “Babuji bachchao”.

“I couldn’t see anything except waterweed in the pond. I was just telling myself that was hallucinating when I heard the voice again,” said the soldier. Then he saw a young girl in the pond, her head barely above the water.

“The officer asked the girl to come out. She said she could not. Her foot had been chopped off. The soldier extended his rifle butt to her and dragged her out. She fainted.

Soon five young men crept out of the pond. And the soldiers, prodding the weed with their rifles, found six bodies within a minute. The officer still could’ not figure out what had happened the previous night.     

Malika, the girl who lived to talk, tells the story, and even she can’t believe it. “Policemen told us we were fazed. Many of us went to sleep. We heard a shout around 4 a.m. and saw that the house was surrounded”, says 16yearold Mallika.

The policemen, she said, were sitting in the distance and smoking.

“We pleaded with the mob. We told them we would leave the village and never come back. Kaleja dahal gaya that (“I was scared”).

At 8 am the mob offered them a deal. It said it would escort them out of the village, but only if they left forever. “We had no choice” says Mallika.

Haltingly, the house emptied itself. Some people took their bag gage along. And as soon as they were in the open, the attack came.

They ran into the houses of friends. But people we used to call “chachi” and “mausi” threw us out saw my mother being turned out of her house and killed”, says Mallika.

Her uncle, a policemen himself lives with her. His wife and son died at Chanderi. Mallika saw

them die.

Her own neighbors “stabbed us and threw the bodies in wells and ponds. We were surrounded. We could not get away.”

Someone tried to grab Mallika’s hand and molest her. She drew away and jumped into the pond. The man slashed at her and chopped off her foot.

Mallika says she fainted after that, bodies all around her. At 10 am she saw the army again and said Babuji bachcao’. Then she fainted “That is when I felt like crying,” said the officer. Two days later the officer conducted a raid and arrested 31 people who con fessed they had attacked Chanderi. They were the same people that Mallika had called “chacha” and “mausi”.

The bodies, meanwhile are still turning up Four were found from the pond on Friday. The well behind Minnat Ali’s house if full of maggots. The fields stink of rotting flesh.

Chanden is not alone in its suffering. And Mallika is not the only victim. But that is another story.

 

Article extracted from this publication >>  November 17, 1989