Then & Now

Eighteen years after the infamous Bhagalpur riots, India Today's Farzand Ahmed visits the town and finds how Logain, one of the worst-hit pockets, is coping.

It was darkness at noon at Logain, 30 km northwest of silk city Bhagalpur on October 27, 1989. Some 116 people were butchered and buried in a mass grave. By then, most parts of the historic town and over 200 villages had been torched in the worst kind of mayhem. Thousands of charkhas and looms that weaved silk day and night had been consumed in an unprecedented communal frenzy and the administration had withdrawn into a cocoon. The country was shell-shocked and angery. Nobody had time to remember that it was here that Rabindranath Tagore had penned the opening stanza of Geetanjali: "Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high … Where the world has not broken up"; Nobody was there to remember the agony of Devdas and Paro, the tragic character Sharat Chandra had immortalised. Only flames were visible and the stench of burning human flesh hung heavy all around.

But the wheels of time moved on slowly. Wounds healed. The field, in which bodies were buried and cauliflowers were grown to camouflage the butchering, stood barren. On July 7, the macabre incident came as a flashback. Additional Sessions and District Judge S.N. Mishra, who had convicted 14 people including 12 co-villagers and Jagdishpur Thana incharge Ramchandra Singh, pronounced their verdict: the accused were all awarded a life-term. The judges said since the crime, though serious, does not fall in the rarest of rare categories, the convicts had been sentenced to life imprisonment.

Nobody could understand the verdict but the administration heaved a sigh of relief. Capital punishment, as argued by the prosecution, might have created a serious law and order problem once again. Convicts' relatives and BJP activists had thronged the court premises but the administration had made elaborate security arrangements.
Among those who received the sentence was Ajablal Mandal, now 32. He was just 15 when when the riots occurred. There was also Sukhdeo Mandal, the oldest among those accused at 82.

Outside the court premises, people talked of the new politics that Logain might define but for the new generation that grew up in the past 18 years, the mayhem and killing was as black a chapter in the history of Bhagalpur as the blinding of 31 undertrail prisoners in 1980 by the police. No doubt, most of the victims had a criminal background but the police with active participation of the local people, most of them victims of the blinding incident, had resorted to 'blind justice' by pouring acid into their eyes. "The police had exhausted all its ammunitions," one officer had claimed. "The criminals were being caught and let off by the court on bail." But nobody was convinced that this alone was reason for the police to take the law into their own hands.

Over the years, the socio-physical contour of Bhagalpur itself has changed. Roads are being widened; the railway station is being modernized under the direct supervision of Railway Minister Lalu Prasad, who was often accused of delaying justice under his Raj, and new markets and malls have come up. Even the Akshvani Mazar that was converted into a magnificent Shiv temple overnight by the communalists in the heart of Bhagalpur no longer evokes reactions.
What many of the survivors however remember is that in most cases, neighbours had turned killers. Professor Wasif Ali, who has shifted to Maullachak from Parbatti, says his father was brutally slain because he had stayed back in the house believing that neighbours would do no harm to him but 'we have yet not lost our hope' in humanity and in the Nitish Kumar government and 'we still believe in what he says: the government will provide justice to victims and punish the culprits'. Clearly, despair has given way to hope.

Index