`Who killed our men? Tell us the truth’

“We all want the answer to a single question. Who were those masked gunmen?Why did they kill our men?,” says Shashinder Kaur, who lost all fivemale members of her family including her husband. “The inquiry is very important. In fact, it is late. Let the truth come out. We want this mystery to be solved once for all.”

Sitting in the compound of the newly constructed Government Primary School,Shashinder Kaur and another widow Narinder Kaur talk of the realsuffering that sank in later — there were no more relatives and friends toconsole them.

“My eight-year-old daughter has been ill since the massacre. She always asks me about the massacre,” says Narinder Kaur, whose husband, Gurbakhash Singh and three other male family members were massacred. “My children want to know everything. In fact, they were more close to their father than me and they miss him everyday.”

Both the widows have been given a job in the Government school so that they can feed their families.

Nanak Singh Bedi was the only survivor and eyewitness of the Chittisinghpora massacre. He had been seriously injured. “I can only tell you those masked killers were human beings. I cannot say whether they were Armymen or militants or who,” he said.

He too strongly favours an independent inquiry. “It was a big conspiracy and everything had been planned. It needs a thorough investigation to expose it.” He said the militants had not done any harm to them during the past 10 years.

Bedi, however, was sceptical about the Government going ahead with theinquiry. “Our own community came to our rescue, otherwise the Government did nothing beyond the Rs 1 lakh ex-gratia relief. They had promised a phone line, medical facility and improvement of the road but nothing happened,” he said. “If there had been a phone earlier, many of our injured would have survived. We could have called for help immediately.”

A few yards away is the Khalsa School. A symbol of reconciliation between Sikh villagers and their Muslim neighbours, the healing process after the massacre owes everything to this private school.

There are six Muslims among the nine teaching staff here and around 105 among the 220 students. Even the principal is a Muslim. “Mutual suspicion had ruined everything between the two communities after the massacre,” said Jagdish Kaur, a teacher in the Khalsa School. “But after the school opened, we too started talking to each other and relations started normalising soon,” she said.

She said people from both the communities would welcome any independentinquiry so that the truth is revealed. “Only those who don’t want truth tosurface will oppose an inquiry,” she said. “Nobody here is sure aboutthe identity of the killers, so the inquiry is essential to remove thedoubts and suspicions engulfing the massacre.”

The principal of the Khalsa school, Abdul Rehman said their aim at theschool is to save the children from hatred that had crept into relations of the elders in the two communities. “It is a difficult thing to do. Almost every class here has children orphaned in that massacre,” he said. “We want the children to forget that incident and we are following a rule. We never ask these students about their fathers. We don’t ask questions like who is your father.”