Sambhal mosque violence: Eight months on, fact-finding committee releases report
The survey of the 16-century mosque was ordered by a local court on November 19, after a petition claimed a temple had been demolished to build the mosque in 1526. The order had been passed by the court of Civil Judge (Senior Division), Chandausi, Aditya Singh. The first survey took place on November 19. It was during the second survey on November 24 that violence broke out.
The 114-page report was released on Tuesday by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), in collaboration with Karwan-e-Mohabbat.
The report, titled 'Sambhal: Anatomy of an Engineered Crisis – Myth, Violence, and the Weaponisation of Faith in a Muslim-majority city', alleged that on November 24, a slogan-shouting crowd accompanied officials and the mosque's ablution tank was drained — seen by many as a symbolic act of desecration — and this triggered violent clashes.
Sambhal District Magistrate, Dr Rajender Pensiya, called the report a farce.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Pensiya said a report can say anything. 'People became violent and started pelting stones at the police and the administration. The entire country heard the announcement when we were requesting them to go back,' he said.
'As far as the rumour of digging inside the mosque premises is concerned, if there was any digging, the soil would have been placed outside,' he said.
Prepared by researcher Prakriti, Advocate Ahmad Ibrahim and activist Harsh Mandar, the report highlights two major issues — the process of the survey and what happened after it.
'On November 19, (advocate) Hari Shankar Jain and son Vishnu Shankar Jain, alongside Mahant Rishiraj Giri, priest of the Kela Devi Mandir, filed a petition in the district court in the morning requesting an immediate survey of the mosque, claiming it was actually a temple,' said the report.
It said the government's advocate in this case did not raise any objections and an 'ex parte judgement' was passed in the afternoon, without hearing the mosque's representatives, allowing the survey to proceed within hours.
'Suspicion and unease spread among Muslim residents, intensified by the lack of standard precautionary protocols, such as notifying the Peace Committee or following basic communication norms,' it claimed.
It further said, 'Police responded to the crowd of protesting Muslims with lathi charges, tear gas, and gunfire. Five Muslim men were killed, dozens injured, and over 85 were arrested. Eyewitness testimonies and videos contradict the official narrative that the crowd was violent.'
The report further claimed in the weeks following the clash, 'police conducted house-to-house raids in Muslim neighbourhoods, filed dubious FIRs, and targeted political figures and activists'.
As per the report, a few weeks after the violence, the Sambhal administration launched an anti-encroachment drive on December 14, specifically targeting areas like Sarai Tarin Main Market, Hindupura Kheda, Deepa Sarai, Khaggu Sarai, including areas near the residences of Samajwadi Party MP Zia Ur Rehman Barq, MLA Iqbal Mehmood, and SP leaders Aqeelur Rehman Khan and Firoz Khan that were affected by the unrest.
The District Magistrate, however, said the actions were taken based on revenue records. 'If it belongs to the government and has been illegally encroached by people, we need to act on it,' he said.
DM Pensiya also said that there was no correlation between the violence and the encroachment drive in the district. 'Encroachment drives are a regular process of any administration and it has nothing to do with the violence. The drive against the electricity theft had also begun by September 1,' he said.
As for the ablution tank, he said it was emptied to check its depth.
So far, 79 people, including three women, have been arrested.
Last month, police filed a chargesheet against MP Barq and 22 others in connection with the case, officials had said.
The police had also said that the investigation found no involvement of Sohail Iqbal in inciting the violence at the mosque, though he was present at the spot. Iqbal is the son of the local Samajwadi Party MLA, Iqbal Mehmood.
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Below are extracts from what I learned from them. Mohd Aamir Khan I was 18 when I was kidnapped. I do not call it an arrest. Men in plain clothes caught me in a dark lonely corner when I was walking after dinner to a medicine shop. They threw me into a Gypsy, blind-folded me, tied my hands behind my back, and held me for seven days and nights in a building that was not a police station. An arrest is something that is done to you according to the constitution, the law, by a procedure prescribed in the CrPC [The Code of Criminal Procedure]. I was not arrested, I was kidnapped. I thought they were criminals. I could not imagine they were policemen. No one in my family until then had seen the inside of a court, let alone a police station. I was born in Old Delhi and knew little of the world outside this. I was a teenager and believed that the police existed to protect us. I asked the men why they had kidnapped me. One growled threateningly with a swear word. During the 30-minute journey, I kept wondering why I had been kidnapped. I had seen in Hindi films that people were kidnapped either because of family enmity, or for ransom from very rich people. I was puzzled because we had no such enemies, and I was raised in a lower-middle-class family. The Gypsy reached a building where I was dragged into a room. The men pulled off my blindfold but also all my clothes. I tried to hide my private parts. But one of them laughed – why are you ashamed, this is our everyday work. For seven days and nights I was subjected to third-degree torture. The pain was excruciating, I was screaming, crying. But the men were casual and unaffected by my yelling and pleading, as though this was their routine work. They also tortured me with no fear, no sense that they will be held accountable for this. The torture haunts me even today. They tore off my nails and injected petrol into my anus. They gave me electric shocks on my nipples and private parts. They would make me drink a lot of water: I would then be made to urinate in a tub in which the electric wires were immersed, so I would suffer shocks in my genitals. They would press my feet and my back with wooden logs. These were all assaults that did not leave visible signs of injury on one's body. As the days of torture continued, I began to understand slowly that these must be policemen, because handcuffs and wireless sets appeared. When a senior came in, they would salute in the way policemen salute. They forced me to sign blank confession papers and took me to the magistrate's court. I did not know where they were taking me, but they warned me that I must remain silent: 'Remember that in the end you will come back to us'. When I entered the courtroom, I understood it was a court because I had seen courtrooms in films. I had no lawyer. The judge, the prosecutor, the policemen all spoke in English. I did not understand a word. I kept silent because the police had warned me. I was to learn later that the crime I was charged for was a series of bomb blasts in the NCR region that occurred two years earlier, in 1996. After this I was placed in legal custody. I was taken every 24 hours to be examined by the doctor. But the policeman would tell the doctor, 'Remember the bomb blasts when you had to extract the pellets from the bodies of the victims'. Then he would point to me, in handcuffs, and say, 'He is the person who exploded that bomb'. One doctor replied, 'I don't see any injuries on his body. You are not doing enough. Do your job well. I am here. Don't worry. I will sign the papers that there has been no torture'. This is how they would speak to the doctors, the nurses, the media, even to the courts. The result was the complete choking of any human sympathy and compassion that they might have had. Leave aside compassion, they became unwilling to defend even the rights that the law had given me. This is how they would poison people in all the institutions that were there to protect us. But there were also good examples. I remember being taken in handcuffs to a woman doctor. She asked me if I had any injuries. I was just a child, and very frightened, so I kept silent. She said to the policeman, 'Unlock his handcuffs and leave the room. I want to examine him carefully'. The policeman tried to dissuade her, saying I was a dangerous terrorist. But she was firm. 'I know what my duties are,' she said severely to the policeman. The impact of this torture on my mind and my body have not gone away, although 27 years have passed since that time. In the winter cold or monsoons, my limbs ache. Much worse are the mental health consequences. My mind is not yet fully healed. After my release in 2012, I was treated by the psychiatrist Dr Achal Bhagat, and this helped me. But many times I still wake up while sleeping, screaming or begging for mercy. The nightmares do not leave me. Often, I cannot sleep through the night. It is as though those days of torture and those 14 years in prison will never leave me. They will follow me through my life like a shadow. In jail I learned that I was not the only one who suffered third-degree torture at the hands of the police. Many jail inmates told me similar stories. I often wonder what kind of training is given to these public officials. How do they crush within themselves the most elementary human compassion? There is no humanity in their faces, in their eyes. The faces of the men who tortured me I still remember all these years later. If you are in illegal custody, even if you die, the police do not care. They will just put your body into a bag and dispose it off. I felt safer with legal custody. Prison is another world, hidden behind tall, thick walls and iron bars. This is a deaf and mute world. I say this because the voices, the cries from the world within never reach the outside world. And if the voices reach, no one outside pays any heed. They think of jail as a kind of taboo. If bad things happen inside to the prisoners, that is fine, that is as it should be. There has been much less work on prisoners' rights in India than what I hear about countries in Europe. There is a Russian writer, I don't remember his name, but he said that if you wish to understand a society, look at the arrangements of its jails. Why are our jails full of people who are poor and uneducated, of Dalits and Adivasis? I found in jail that prisoners have a range of talents and capabilities. The trouble is that they had used these in the wrong way. But if treated well, these talents can be used for the good of society. Jails have held Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru and Jai Prakash Narayan. There are innocent people in prisons, and every person in prison is a human being who can contribute to making a better world after his release. I was raised in Old Delhi. In my childhood, I had Hindu and Sikh friends. But as I grew to adulthood, they moved out from our neighbourhood, I don't know where. This happened from around 1989, when Advani ji had set out on his Rath Yatra and society began to tear apart. Today in Old Delhi, Hindus and Muslims live in separate neighbourhoods. As I grew into a young man, I was deprived of the beauty of this country in which people of every religion, caste, language, region live side by side. The best thing about jail was that here I found this India, in which there were Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and atheists, people speaking diverse languages, people of diverse castes. We would all eat together, spend time together. I learned about other communities, their ways of life, their problems. In jail I experienced pain but also humanity. In the year 2000, I was thrown by the jailor into solidarity confinement for five months. On the gate of my cell, they draped a blanket so that even the light of the sun would not penetrate. The jailor had strictly warned other prison inmates that if anyone talked to me or shared anything from the jail canteen, they would be severely punished. Ramzan came, and I started my roza fasts. Two fellow prisoners, one Sikh called Baljit and a Hindu called Karan would come every morning at 6 am to my cell, their faces wrapped in mufflers so no one could recognise them. They would throw into my cell each day a packet of dates and a packet of milk for my fast, and then would run away. They never spoke a word to me. They were not even of my faith, they did not know me personally, but they had so much respect for my religious beliefs that they bravely took the risk of punishment so that I could maintain my fast. I learned a lot from them, about humanity and courage. In some ways the suffering of the family of the accused person is even greater than that of the person in jail. In jail he might come to terms somehow with his situation. At least he gets his food on time, he has a routine. But the family that is outside, their suffering is relentless. Society, the police, the media treat them as pariahs. When you are in prison, your family has to earn a living. Many people are unwilling to employ you. On court days, they have to miss the day's wages. Before I was charged with these crimes, my father was given a lot of respect in the community. But now people would shrink away from him. This caused him a lot of suffering. When he went to court, people would taunt him as the father of a terrorist. He was unable to pay attention to his small business, and court expenses and lawyers' fees ate away all our savings. My mother's jewellery was sold, and bit by bit the little property that we owned. Two years after my arrest, my father died. In jail I had no idea of this. It was in the next court hearing that the lawyer informed me that my father had died. The judge condoled with me. I cannot remember anything of what transpired after that in the court. I turned completely numb as I stood there handcuffed. I was helpless and dazed. After the hearing, I walked back through the prison gates into my barrack and lay down. I felt a zinda laash, a living corpse. Years later, after my release, I go sometimes to the graveyard. But I do not even know which spot my father lay buried. I just stand in a corner and pray in his memory. After his death, my mother had to step out of the home to fight my legal case. She was unlettered, had always lived in purdah in her home. But for the next 10 years, she alone fought my legal cases in court. In 2010, she suffered a brain haemorrhage that left her paralysed. After my release in 2012, I found her in this state, a zinda laash. When I stepped out of the gates of the prison in 2012, not just 14 years had passed, the century had changed over. For a prisoner who spends many years in prison, his chronological age increases but he remains stuck at that point of time when he was brought into prison. When he finally steps out of prison, he tries to pick up from where he left off when he was jailed. But that is impossible. I went into jail when my parents were alive and healthy, they were respected in the community, and we had a decent home. None of this was there when I was released. I had to start life again from minus zero. Also, technology. When I was kidnapped in 1998, there were no mobile phones, no metro, no PVR Cinemas, no plastic money (ATM and credit cards), no email, no shopping malls. It took me a long time to learn all of this. I am still learning. When people hear of someone being released from jail, they think that his problems will now be sorted out. Of course, freedom is a great blessing. But so many challenges remain. How will society treat him? Will he get the same respect and position in his community that he enjoyed before he was jailed? Will he get a job, and if so what kind of job? Will the police continue to harass him? Will he still be taunted as a terrorist? Besides, a person spends those long years in prison when he could have educated himself, learned a skill, started a business, taken a job. Deprived of all of this, it is very hard for him to restart life without the robust support of the state. Since the state did none of this for me, I was saved because senior leaders of Delhi civil society did for me what the state should have done. The state has a policy of rehabilitating surrendered militants. These are people who admit that they engaged in terror attacks, and now are turning their backs on this life. I support this policy. But how about people who have not committed any terror crime, yet suffer torture, the suffering of prison sentences, their families destroyed outside? Why is there no policy to rehabilitate these persons? It is important for us to have this conversation. People mostly do not know; they do not care about our predicament. The media creates a sensation when we are arrested and charged with terror crimes. The coverage when we are proved innocent is so much smaller. People think this is a small matter and let it pass from their conscience and consciousness. But spending 14 or 19 years in prison when you are innocent is not a small matter. It should stir the conscience of the nation. Abdul Wahid Shaikh I was not arrested immediately after the Mumbai train bomb blasts on July 11, 2006. Those terror blasts were horrifying. In the crowded compartments of seven different local trains at peak hour, within the space of seven minutes, bombs exploded. More than 200 people were killed and over 700 injured. It is for this crime of the train terror explosions that 13 of us were accused, tortured and jailed. One of us died in prison, I was released after nine years, the other 12 are now acquitted in 2025. After 19 years they walked out of jail. Five were on death row for ten years. Now, the Bombay High Court has ruled that we are all innocent. My formal arrest was not immediately after the train blasts. This happened only three months later, in September. There was an old case of SIMI terror filed against me from 2001, which was proved to be false and I was acquitted. The police used this, and cases like this, to charge all 13 of us. Why were we charged with this terror crime? We were all Muslim, we were all Indians, we all were men who had faith in the Constitution. Before being charged with the Bombay terror blasts, we were all earning our livelihoods in different ways. I was a teacher, another worked in a hospital, one ran a food and vegetable business, one ran a mobile repair shop. (This man, who repaired mobiles, today 19 years later, does not know how to operate an Android mobile phone. He asks me, how do I send a WhatsApp message or an email message). We were mostly were married with children. For three months before our formal arrest, the police would summon us, and illegally detain us sometimes for days at a stretch. They would thrash us each time. The police warned us and our families: don't complain to the media or to the courts. Stay away from everyone. If you break these rules, we will charge you for this train blast terror crime. Because of these threats, we remained silent and our families too were silent. We kept our hearts large and resolved to cooperate with the investigation. We accepted and endured our illegal detentions and thrashing by the police. When the police would learn the truth, they would set us free and our suffering would end. We still had faith. But this did not happen. Even though the police after investigating knew we were innocent, when they could not find the real criminals, they charged us with the terror crimes. The truth is that the police failed to find the real criminals. Not then and not now, all these 19 years later. So, they thought – let us frame these men for the crime. They have old terror crimes in the SIMI case behind them (even though they had been found innocent). They are practicing Muslims. They wear beards and skull caps. We will present them as the men guilty of the horrific bomb blasts on the train. The media will be happy, the families of those killed in the blasts will be satisfied, the public will be appeased. They announced that we are associated with the Lashkar-e- Taiba, the ISI, Al Qaeda. They would keep holding up the Al Qaeda manual, saying that in this the guilty are taught to falsely allege that the police have tortured them. Our torture was in two phases. The first phase was during our illegal detention. I told you that this went on intermittently over three months, mainly beatings. Then began our legal police detention. The police cleverly first registered seven different FIRs for each of the bomb blasts in seven trains. The magistrate was told that there was no larger conspiracy, as if different groups independently organised each of the seven blasts in seven trains. So, for each of the FIRs, they would seek 15 days' police custody. When 15 days were over, they would again seek police custody for the next FIR. This went on for seven FIRs. When all seven were over, the police claimed now that they had discovered a single larger terror conspiracy linking all seven train blasts. The case was now brought under the draconian Maharashtra Control of Organised Crimes Act, and the magistrate now granted another 30 days' police remand. In this way we underwent 80 to 90 days of police remand. I often think that the police must be having a different manual on how to torture. They act with so much cruelty, they show no mercy. There is this medicinal oil for aches and pains called Surya Prakash. They inject this into our anus. The result of this is that a horrible burning sensation spreads to all of your body. You start jumping in pain. The police encourage you to go to the toilet. But when you wash yourself with water, the pain grows even more unbearably. They give electric shocks on your private parts and nipples. They part your legs at 180 degrees, so you start bleeding from your penis. They also resort to water-boarding. For this, they hang you upside down, cover your face with a cloth and then thrust water into your nostrils. You gag and feel that you are drowning. You feel so desperate, you plead with the police – give me any paper to sign, I will sign it, but let me go. The room is kept dark. Sometimes you are blind-folded, sometimes not. Sometimes the temperature is drastically reduced. In the ice-cold room, you are naked, so you keep shivering. The torture room is sound-proof. The Anti-Terro Squad office is located in the middle of a crowded habitation, but however loudly you scream, no one can hear you outside. This was not all. They make us watch the torture of our companions. If you close your eyes or turn your face away, they beat you and force you to watch. This would begin to break our spirit. Even more damaging was what they did to members of our families. For example, there are two brothers in our group of accused men. The police brought their father, stripped him naked and made him parade before the brothers. And then they stripped the brothers, and forced their father to watch them walk naked. If any of them tried to cover their private parts, they would beat them with their batons. Faisal could not bear to see this humiliation of his father. He begged the police, give me any paper to sign and I will sign it. If you want me to confess to the 9/11 attack in America, I am willing even to do this. My only plea is, let my father wear his clothes again. Then they called their bhabhi, and tore off her veil. They would call the mothers, wives and sisters of the accused men, and threaten to rape them. A man can handle a lot of torture when he is the target. But he breaks down when his family is humiliated in front of him. The police would tell us that if you want to be freed from this torture, you will have to sign the papers we give you. Without even reading the papers, you must sign. The law is supposed to protect you because the DK Basu judgment required the police to present us to a doctor for medical examination every 48 hours. This they complied with, on paper. We were taken to various hospitals. But each time, the medical report would always be completely fake. The Bombay High Court said precisely this when they dismissed the case. Someone said to me the other day, torture is necessary in police investigations, because without torture the accused will not accept their crimes. My reply to him was this: okay, if that is the case, pass a provision in law that in criminal investigations torture is a must. Take this bill to Parliament, admit that police use torture for criminal investigation, and justify this in Parliament. But instead, right up to today, the police deny that they have tortured any of us. The torture for 80 or 90 days of police custody that we endured was so agonising, that when we finally were sent to prison, we felt great relief. Ek sukoon sa laga. Those days of torture will stay with us for the rest of our lives. Our limbs still ache in winter. My eyesight is dimming. Even in deep sleep, I get nightmares of the torture. If someone knocks on our door after midnight, my wife and children always panic that the police have come to pick me up. For us, one of the most painful things in prison was the death of our loved ones while we were in prison. My father passed away a year after I was jailed. I had no idea that my father had gone. We are not some famous personalities that this news would be carried in newspapers. It was left to the members of the family to share this news with me. My mother, my wife and my sister came for the mulaqat (those days there was no system of phone calls). They agonised how they should break this news to me, because I was already in so much distress. So, what happens? When they come for the mulaqat, they stay silent, they look left and right, and then they begin to weep. I realise that something is terribly wrong but don't know what this is. I beg them to tell me. The mulaqat is only for 20 minutes. The minutes pass quickly. Finally, when there is just one minute left for the mulaqat to end, they say, 'Don't worry, don't feel any tension. But Abbu is no longer with us'. My grief and loss are greater than I can bear because I could not be with our father when he was dying, I could not organise his medical care, I could not be at hand to comfort my mother and sisters. Not just me. Everyone among the thirteen of us lost their loved ones while we were in jail. Someone lost his father, someone his mother, someone both parents, someone a wife, someone a brother, and so on. Each of us faced this same sorrow. A jailer said to us, 'We too lose our loved ones just as you do. The difference is that we are there by their bedside when they leave this world. But you are far away'. This is our harshest punishment. Those of us who were charged with crimes of treason against the nation and terror killings faced hostility and discrimination from the jail staff and a section of the prisoners, as though we were not even human beings from this planet. But on the other hand, at least we were housed somewhere, had food, a mattress to sleep in, a routine. We would try to come to terms with our situation; we reasoned with ourselves that we suffered because we were charged with such grave crimes. However, our families were not even charged with any crime, except that they were linked to us. I think the punishment that our families endured was much harsher than ours. We were in jail bound by a routine, waking up at a particular hour, eating at a particular hour, and so on, behind the high walls of the prison. But they had to face alone the hostile world outside: relatives, the media, police. And they needed to survive through all of this. Their one earning member is in prison. The children's school fees have to be paid. Sisters have to be married off. Parents need medicines. So many demands. Many children drop out of school. Parents cannot afford the medicine they needed to stay alive. Relatives break their bonds, friends turn away. Our relatives distance themselves from us, not because they think we are guilty of terror crimes, but because they fear that the wrath of the ATS that had made us terror accused, that wrath should not be directed toward them. My wife was in purdah, but with me in prison, she had to step out of her home and earn an income. Her two children drank milk from her breasts, but since she had to work outside, they were switched to bottles. These many small things our families endured, but none of this will be considered worthy of being written down in any book. Think of the wife who waits 19 years for the return of her husband. She does not divorce him and remarry. She holds on desperately to the hope that he will one day be released, because she knows he is innocent. Think of the daughter who was born after her father went to prison. She never saw her father's face, and he never saw her face. In normal times, she could have studied and become a doctor or engineer. But with her father in prison, none of this was possible. When you get your first judicial remand, you think you will be in jail for 14 days, because that is the length of the remand. And these 14 days stretch to 14 years. It is a kind of slow poison that you are fed. Think of the five men in our case who were awarded the death penalty by the trial court. The appeal against this order took 10 years to be resolved. Imagine, for 10 years they were forced to live with the dagger of death hanging over their heads. Each day could bring them closer to the gallows. I said they were forced to live this way for 10 years. I should have said, they were forced to die a little like this every day for 10 years. Every day you grapple with the fear that news will come that the appeal is rejected and you are marched to the gallows. You are housed next to the hanging room. Every day, the gallows are oiled, and you can hear it. And you think, these gallows are being readied for me. This is the slow poison that I speak of. I salute the two judges of the Bombay High Court. They had the courage, the daring, the vision, and the conscience, to look at 10 untruths and decide that this is the one truth. If they did not have this courage, these men would be facing the gallows. Even though they were innocent and they continue to be innocent. After 19 years you are released from jail. The world has entirely changed. I was travelling on the flight with Sajid Ansari, one of the men who was just released. He came to Delhi to meet his family here. He said to me, 'I am travelling in a plane after 19 years'. I asked him, 'How did you travel by plane 19 years ago?' It was the ATS, he said, that had flown him to Bangalore for a narco-test. He was confused at every turn in the airport. Everything had changed. He could not step on to an escalator. We get used to doing many things at the same time: sipping our coffee, talking on the phone, lining up for our check-in, and so on. In jail, you do only one thing at a time. Sajid said, I am feeling dizzy. What should the state do? After the acquittal and release order, within 24 hours the Maharashtra government had reached the Supreme Court with an appeal. This kind of hostility to a section of citizens is shameful. To begin with, the impunity that the police enjoy must end. When we were tortured, the police were fully confident that no harm could come to them. They were protected by the home ministry, by the government. Even if someone died in torture, it would take them no time to convert the death from a torture killing to an 'encounter' (claiming that the police had to kill him in self-defence because he tried to kill policepersons). Let us talk next of compensation for innocents who spent long years in jail. People advise us to approach the courts. I don't understand this. When we were accused, we had to find lawyers to defend us. When we are innocent, we still have to find lawyers to approach courts to compensate us. Does society owe us no responsibility? Does no responsibility vest with the government? Parliament should bring a law for compulsory compensation. Sajid said to me: what compensation in the whole world can compensate for the 19 years that we spent in prison? Calculate this – my life, my wife, my children, they were all snatched away from me. My youth, can you bring back my youth? What is the cost of all of this? I said to Sajid – for an innocent man to spend 19 years in jail, the compensation should be at least 19 crore rupees. Sajid said, no, even this is not enough. 'The compensation that I seek is that in future, no innocent person should be framed like I was. No innocent person should have to spend time in prison like I did. This is the only compensation that I seek'. These were his words.
