BOOK REVIEW
Book: Hashimpura 22 May: The Forgotten Story of India’s Biggest Custodial Killing
Author: Vibhuti Narain Rai
Translated from Hindi by: Darshan Desai
Publisher: Penguin Books India (2016)
Price: ₹399 (paperback; publisher’s Indian list price)
An Indian police officer’s account of a massacre in 1987 is both a devastating reconstruction of the killings and a searching indictment of the institutions that failed the victims.
The police were about to abandon their search when somebody coughed. It was late on 22 May 1987, beside a canal near Ghaziabad in northern India. By torchlight, officials had found bodies in the bushes, on the banks and in the water. They had shouted that they were there to help, but nobody answered. Then came the cough. Half-submerged among the vegetation was a young man called Babudin, shaking with fear. He had survived being shot by men in police uniform, and had every reason to suspect that the new arrivals meant to finish the job.
The officer leading that search was Vibhuti Narain Rai, then superintendent of police in Ghaziabad. Nearly three decades later, in Hashimpura 22 May: The Forgotten Story of India’s Biggest Custodial Killing, he returned to the scene that had haunted him. Translated from Hindi by Darshan Desai and published in English in 2016, his book is no detached history of a forgotten atrocity. It is eyewitness testimony, an investigation of an investigation, and an argument about what happens when a democratic state regards some of its citizens as outsiders.
The story begins in Meerut, northeast of Delhi, amid Hindu–Muslim violence. By May 1987, curfews, killings and rumours had poisoned public life. The army, police and Uttar Pradesh’s Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), a state armed police force, were deployed. A PAC rifle had been seized during the unrest. On 21 May, Prabhat Kumar, related to an army officer and a prominent local political family, was shot dead. Rai examines these incidents as possible triggers for collective punishment. Yet the men subsequently murdered were not shown to have committed either offence.
On the following afternoon, armed personnel descended on Hashimpura, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood of Meerut. Men were taken from their houses and assembled under guard. Hundreds were detained; the subsequent court judgment referred to some 644 arrests. The gathering included elderly men, labourers, young adults and boys. Some were released, others dispatched to police stations. Approximately 42 to 45 were placed in a yellow PAC truck. According to the survivors, the men chosen for this final journey tended to be young and physically strong. Rai sees that selection as evidence that they were being singled out as the supposed strength of a hostile community.
Among them was Zulfiqar Nasir, about 18 at the time. He had been taken from his home with relatives. His grandfather was allowed to leave; Zulfiqar remained. In the truck the prisoners were ordered to squat, keeping their heads down. A man who tried to look out could be struck with a rifle butt. They assumed they were going to a police station or prison. Instead the vehicle drove away from Meerut, towards a canal at Muradnagar.
There, the rear shutter opened and the prisoners were told to get out. Zulfiqar remembered a man named Yasin emerging first. He was shot and thrown into the water. Another, Ashraf, followed him. The others recoiled, trying to press themselves deeper inside the truck, but armed men dragged them out. Each departure became another burst of gunfire. Zulfiqar was pulled from the vehicle, shot through the upper body and thrown into the canal. He landed near vegetation, away from the main current, and clung to the bank, pretending to be dead.
A passing vehicle interrupted the shooting. Its headlights suddenly illuminated the scene. The gunmen threatened its driver and ordered the lights extinguished. The PAC truck then departed, carrying prisoners who had not yet been killed, some of them wounded. When the vehicles had gone, Zulfiqar discovered another survivor, Arif, in the water. They found a badly injured man, Kamruddin, and struggled to carry him towards the highway. He would later die. The details make the account almost unbearable: not because Rai embellishes the violence, but because survival depended on such small accidents as where a body landed or whether headlights appeared at the right moment.
The truck continued towards a second waterway near Makanpur, by the Hindon. The killings resumed. Babudin remembered prisoners resisting the order to descend, and PAC men pulling them out by their clothes and limbs. Gunfire struck those inside as well as outside the vehicle. A handloom worker named Ayyub, whom Babudin knew from his neighbourhood, clung to his legs before the grip weakened. Babudin was grazed by bullets and fell among bushes beside the water. He lay without moving while, he recalled, policemen searched with torches, firing at bodies that showed signs of life. When they finally drove away, he remained concealed. In his world, the uniform no longer signified rescue.
That is the book’s central horror. These were not deaths in a firefight, nor victims accidentally caught between rival crowds. The men had been detained, unarmed and placed under the authority of the state. Their custodians transported them to secluded locations and shot them. The Delhi High Court would later establish 38 deaths and five survivors, while Rai’s narrative uses the higher contemporary figure of 42 killed. Only 11 bodies were subsequently identified by relatives; others were never recovered. The numbers differ across accounts, but the essential fact does not: those charged with protecting the prisoners murdered them.
Rai’s arrival at the Hindon scene turns the book from a survivor’s narrative into an institutional reckoning. Sub-inspector V. B. Singh, who had heard gunfire, had encountered a speeding yellow truck marked with the number of the PAC’s 41st Battalion. Rai went to the battalion compound and learned that the vehicle had returned, entered amid an argument at the gate, and been washed before leaving again. He describes wet concrete and what appeared to be blood mixed with water. Yet the truck was not immediately seized and preserved for forensic examination. A piece of potentially decisive evidence was allowed to slip away.
What followed was, in Rai’s telling, an almost equally appalling struggle to persuade the authorities to behave as though murder remained murder when policemen committed it. The state’s chief minister, Veer Bahadur Singh, was informed. Senior officials discussed the danger of attempting to arrest armed PAC men during widespread unrest, mindful of an earlier rebellion within the force. Rai recalls suggestions that bodies might be swept away in the canal and even that surviving witnesses could be eliminated. These are exceptionally grave claims, drawn from his recollection of conversations whose individual speakers he cannot always identify. They deserve scrutiny, not casual repetition as proven orders. What is beyond dispute is that the perpetrators were not promptly secured and the evidence deteriorated.
Here the book’s political argument begins to take shape. Rai refuses to explain Hashimpura as the work of a few unusually cruel policemen. He asks how officers could kill men they had never met and against whom they had no personal grievance. His answer lies in communal prejudice embedded within ordinary social life, carried into police stations and barracks by recruits who grow up absorbing it. He describes senior officers using the language of “us” and “them”, with Hindus implicitly belonging to the first category and Muslims to the second. During riots, he argues, the police do not always stand between two communities: they can become an armed participant in the conflict.
Rai is particularly effective when describing how everyday policing produces radically different experiences of citizenship. In research conducted after the massacre, he questioned Hindu and Muslim victims of communal disturbances about whether they regarded the police as protectors. The Hindu respondents were more likely to say yes; the Muslim respondents more likely to see the police as a threat. His observation is not that every officer shares a prejudice, or that every encounter ends in violence, but that a uniform may offer reassurance to one citizen and inspire terror in another. Babudin’s refusal to answer the rescuers calling from the canal becomes the most terrible illustration of that divide.
The book situates this mistrust within a longer history: colonial divide-and-rule, Partition, periodic communal riots and the mobilisation surrounding the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the disputed Babri Masjid site at Ayodhya. The 1987 killings occurred under a Congress state government and during Rajiv Gandhi’s premiership. That matters. Rai’s criticism is not adequately reduced to an indictment of any one party or the later rise of Hindu-nationalist government. He describes a deeper institutional problem, one that could survive changes of administration because it drew strength from assumptions in society itself.
His sociological analysis can be overconfident. Descriptions of what the “average Hindu” believes flatten a vast population. Colonial divide-and-rule is part of the story, not an exhaustive explanation, and the survey evidence is described without enough methodology to sustain every generalisation. Yet his central question—can police be impartial when their own culture reflects communal divisions?—remains unavoidable.
Rai also questions whether Muslim officials and politicians held back because defending Muslim victims risked accusations of communal favouritism. The pressure he identifies may be real, but attributing individual officials’ hesitation to that fear remains an interpretation, not an established fact.
Rai also argues, from military diaries and investigative records, that army officers improperly assumed civilian policing functions during the round-up. He suspects the executions were sanctioned above platoon level: selection, transportation and two killing sites suggest organisation. But involvement in the arrests is not proof of ordering the murders, and prosecutors never established the identity of any senior official who may have authorised them.
The passages on the press are especially valuable. Rai helped prepare a detailed story for Nav Bharat Times, only to watch it repeatedly fail to appear. The smaller weekly Chauthi Duniya eventually published it. He also compares conflicting Hindi- and Urdu-language coverage of the riots. Some papers amplified suspicion; others hesitated to confront the security forces. Rai cannot know every editor’s motive, but he shows how silence, too, shapes public memory.
The second half of the tragedy unfolded in the criminal courts. The investigation was transferred to the Crime Branch-CID, but the case took nine years to produce charges. Rai details contradictory witness statements, identification problems, poorly handled evidence and the extraordinary failure to preserve the truck. He suspects that parts of the investigation were designed to benefit the accused. Whether every failure was deliberate cannot be proved merely from its consequences. But the effect was undeniable. In March 2015, after 28 years, a Delhi trial court acquitted the 16 surviving defendants because it was not satisfied that the prosecution had reliably identified them as the perpetrators.
For Rai, who wrote in the shadow of that acquittal, it seemed to confirm that the state had failed the dead twice: first by killing them, then by losing the means to punish their killers. His book was published before the case took a decisive turn. In October 2018 the Delhi High Court, considering additional evidence, overturned the acquittals and convicted 16 former PAC personnel of murder, kidnapping, conspiracy and destroying evidence, sentencing them to life imprisonment. Some later obtained bail from the Supreme Court while their appeals were pending; bail did not annul the convictions. The judgment vindicated the survivors’ long struggle, but could not restore the decades that their families had spent seeking justice.
The book’s strength is also its tension: Rai writes from within the institution he condemns. His access to records was exceptional, but he was not uninvolved. His failure to secure the truck and initial fear of being identified as a journalistic source invite scrutiny; he does not entirely conceal either. The prose can be repetitive and the reconstruction of private thoughts more novelistic than the evidence sustains. Yet the account has an urgency no tidy institutional report could match.
One detail lingers. On the day of the massacre, Jaibunnisa gave birth to a daughter while her husband, Iqbal, was killed at the canal. Rai dedicates the book to the child. The massacre did not end in 1987: it continued through bereaved families, children raised without fathers, and survivors burdened with memories of the night they almost disappeared.
Hashimpura 22 May is an important book not because every inference it makes is unassailable, but because it refuses the most convenient explanation of the crime: that it was an isolated lapse by a handful of bad men. It asks how ordinary prejudice becomes official action, why institutions shield themselves, and how long justice can be deferred before a society begins to accept impunity as normal. Above all, it restores the victims to the centre of a story in which the state repeatedly tried, through violence, delay or silence, to push them aside. That makes it essential reading well beyond India.