CM Yogi targets Oppn over 1978 Sambhal riots: A look at what really happened and its aftermath

What is Sambhal’s recent history?

Sambhal was a part of Moradabad district till 2011 when the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government carved it out as a separate district and named it Bhimnagar. However, just a year later, the Samajwadi Party (SP) government led by Akhilesh Yadav renamed it to Sambhal.

The district has witnessed many riots over the years with the worst one erupting in 1980 under the then V P Singh government in the state. The 1980 riots – a report on which was prepared by the M P Saxena Committee and made public by the Yogi government in August last year – had spread to several districts and resulted in the deaths of around 300 people.

Communal riots were common before Independence and continued even after 1947. It was only in 1967 after riots erupted in places like Ranchi, Hatia, Muzaffarpur, Malegaon, Sholapur, Ahmednagar and Gorakhpur that the Union government-constituted Justice Raghubar Dayal Commission stated: “So long as the attitude of the two major communities in the country does not change from that of distrust to one of mutual trust, as existed prior to the Partition, the danger of conflagrations out of any incident, of whatever nature, between any two members of the communities would continue and it is essential for the administration to remain geared up to meet such sudden situations.”

What triggered the 1978 riots?

According to then CM Ram Naresh Yadav, the riots erupted on March 28, 1978 at an event organised by the students union during Holi celebrations at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Degree College, where some teachers and students were being given “titles”. Among them were some female Muslim students. People in some parts of North India give titles to each other in jest as a part of celebrating Holi.

Objecting to the Muslim students being given titles, one Manzar Sharif who was already at loggerheads with the college management, led a protest the following day with 30 others. The protesters tried to close shops and were met with resistance from Hindu shop owners. The subsequent altercation led to violence in which the Khandsari units belonging to Om Prakash Garg and Banwari Lal were attacked, leaving nine people dead. On March 30, CM Yadav told the UP Assembly that the police fired at least 19 rounds to control the riots.

The 1978 riots occurred when the Janata Party ruled the state – Yadav as CM and Nangal (Saharanpur) MLA Ram Singh as state home minister – while the Union government was led by Morarji Desai as the Prime Minister and Chaudhary Charan Singh as the Home Minister. The then BJS leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani were Union ministers while Kalyan Singh, Keshrinath Tripathi, Om Prakash Singh, Sharda Bhakt Singh, Ravindra Kishore Shahi and some others, who also originally belonged to the BJS, were ministers in the UP government.

Around the same time that Sambhal was hit by violence, riots were also reported from Hyderabad. In Sambhal, newspapers faced heat for their “provocative headlines” and for publishing “exaggerated death tolls” prompting then UP Assembly Speaker Banarasi Das to urge the dailies “not to publish provocative headlines”.

What were the ramifications?

On April 1, 1978, then Union Petroleum Minister and ex-UP CM H N Bahuguna and Shahi Imam of Delhi Jama Masjid Abdullah Bukhari visited Sambhal. CM Yadav, who also visited the spot, made a detailed statement in the Assembly on March 30 and April 4, 1978. Later, the UP State Minorities Commission’s functionaries visited Sambhal and submitted a report to the government in which they made over a dozen recommendations, some of which were related to compensation for victims.

The Sambhal Lok Sabha seat was then represented by the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD)’s Shanti Devi. She was one of the 85 BLD Lok Sabha MPs from the state as all the Janata Party candidates had contested the 1977 Lok Sabha elections on the BLD’s symbol.

In the Assembly, the Janata Party’s Shafiqur Rehman Barq – whose grandson Zia-ur-Rahman Barq of the SP currently represents the Sambhal Lok Sabha seat – represented the constituency then.

How did UP House, Parliament take up the issue?

While the then governments in 1978 avoided discussions on the Sambhal riots in the Assembly as well as the Lok Sabha, on April 4 that year, Independent MLA from Moradabad Rural, Riyasat Hussain requested the Speaker Das not to discuss the issue in the Assembly. As the Speaker conceded the demand, some MLAs like Sitapur legislator Rajendra Gupta of the Janata Party (originally from the BJS) urged the Speaker to hold a closed-door discussion on the issue while keeping the press and visitors’ galleries closed. However, this did not happen as the rules of the Assembly did not permit it and several MLAs, including the Congress’s N D Tewari, former CM, opposed it. Following this, the Speaker ruled that there would be no discussion on the issue.

On April 4, 1978, CPI MP from West Bengal’s Diamond Harbour, Jyotirmoy Basu, raised the Sambhal and Hyderabad riots issue in the Lok Sabha. “Nine persons were shot dead… women were raped by policemen… people have been beaten to death. Parliament cannot be a silent spectator on this,” he said. Devi sought to intervene but was not allowed.

Following repeated demands, a discussion on the issue was held in the Lok Sabha on April 24, 1978 through a motion on “law and order situation in the country”. “The way the government has dealt with it (riots), has stopped it from spreading to other places. There was no question of any retaliation coming from other areas as a result of the steps taken by the government. Otherwise, that would have happened. Does that not show that the government is anxious to deal with such a law and order situation in a proper manner?” PM Desai said during the discussion.

Were the Sambhal riot accused brought to justice?

According to an April 1978 report published in The Indian Express, 15 people were killed while 21 others were injured in the Sambhal riots. The curfew, which was clamped on March 29, 1978 lasted for several days with intermittent relaxations.

Even as Yogi has claimed that the perpetrators of the Sambhal riots have not been brought to the book, then UP home minister Swarup Kumar Bakhshi told the Assembly on March 2, 1982, that 1,272 persons were named as well as 200 unknown persons were booked in the 168 cases related to the 1978 Sambhal violence.

Bakhshi further said 43 cases, in which 473 persons were named, proceeded for trial while the remaining 125 cases were closed due to lack of evidence. Charges were withdrawn on the recommendations of the state government in 12 cases where 31 people were named, while six accused were convicted in two cases. Eighty people in six cases were exonerated by the court.