New Delhi: The bullets in the bodies of three people who received bullet injuries after having been shot at by police during the September 21 eviction drive carried out by Assam government in Darrang district had not been removed even on September 27, when a fact-finding team visited them in hospital, the team has alleged.
The team, led by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), say they visited the Gauhati Medical College and Hospital (GMHC) on September 27 and saw that the bullets had not been removed from the injured persons’ bodies.
“We came across an injured woman, a child and a man with bullets in their bodies who were not operated upon till we visited them at the government-run hospital on September 27. We complained about it. This helped because they were operated upon the very next day,” Nadeem Khan, co-founder of United Against Hate and secretary of APCR, told reporters in New Delhi.
Khan and five others visited Dholpur in Darrang district’s Sipajhar revenue circle last week. He said, “Twelve people were injured in the police shootout during the eviction drive, out of whom, nine were admitted at GMHC for treatment.”
He also alleged that out of the nine, three people, including a 17-year-old boy, who had injuries from bullets that bruised his neck and shoulder, were forcibly discharged from the hospital by police and taken into custody.
“When we visited the family of Moinul Hoque, who is one of the two who died in police firing, we also learnt from the family that his young son, Ashraful Hoque, has to report physically every day at 7 pm to the Sipajhar police station. There, he is asked which media person and activist he met during the day,” Khan said.
“I want to ask, ‘What kind of a treatment is this of a young person who has lost his father in a violent incident?’” Khan added.
At the press meet, APCR released a report based on their visit to the areas where the state government had carried out the eviction drive.
The drive, carried out by Darrang district authorities at Dholpur villages No 1, 2 and 3, had hit national headlines on September 21 after a horrific video clip of a team of Assam Police personnel surrounding a lone evictee holding a stick and shooting at him in close range circulated on social media. Civilian Bijay Kumar Bania, hired as a cameraperson by the district administration to document the eviction process, stomped multiple times on the evictee lying on the ground with a bullet injury on his chest, in a scene of extreme brutality.
‘Culpable homicide’
Senior Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde, speaking at the press meet, focused on state police using “disproportionate force” on the evictees at Dholpur.
“The law grants a person the right to defend his life and property. May be he (Hoque) was wrong because he is supposed to yield to lawful authority. Even then police’s use of gun on him is much in excess of the right to defence. We will have to call it an act of culpable homicide,” said Hedge.
He also added, “What happened in Assam, or what happened yesterday at Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh or recently in Karnal in Haryana, only shows that we now have a violent society and a violent administration. The rule of law has been replaced by rule or danda (baton) and rule of the gun.”
Hegde said, “We have to now ask questions like whether there was an adequate postmortem conducted on the two persons killed during the eviction (in Assam) and whether they were videographed; whether any particular investigation has commenced.”
‘Muslims called names, labelled encroachers’
Writer Farah Naqvi, speaking on the occasion, termed the Assam Police shooting during the eviction as “state-backed terror”. “We crossed a Rubicon with this incident,” she stated, requesting media persons present at the press conference to also ponder over what it would be like for a poor person to lose one’s home and life’s possessions in one stroke. “I have seen a lot of this, in Gujarat, in Muzaffarnagar. In Muzaffarnagar in 2013, more than killings, I saw the displacement of people.”
She also stated, “Muslims have been called by all kinds of names lately…UPSC jihad, land jihad, love jihad, termites…and now they are called encroachers…in Assam. The National Register of Citizens was conducted and when these people passed that test, they are now being labelled encroachers. The motive was clearly not to create a citizens’ register there, but to go after a community. Today if we keep quiet because it is done on Muslims, the same thing will be applied by the state on others too.”
Salman Ahmad, president of the Student Islamic Organisation of India (SIOI), part of the fact-finding team, said they met not only the Darrang district commissioner and the superintendent of police, Sushanta Biswa Sarma, but also his brother and state chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma during the visit to the north-eastern state.