Finding Nellie's smoking gun

How a policeman's wireless message that could have saved 3,000 lives, but was ignored and covered up, was uncovered

Just about three months after the Nellie tragedy, exactly 40 years ago on February 18, 1983, evidence emerged that an officer of the Assam Police had indeed sent out a specific, written warning that armed mobs of Lalung tribals were gathering around Muslim villages.

The message — later published on the cover of the India Today issue dated May 15, 1983 — read in all capitals (often the language of police wireless): “INFORMATION RECEIVED THAT L/NIGHT ABOUT ONE THOUSAND ASSAMESE OF SURROUNDING VILLAGES OF NELLIE WITH DEADLY WEAPONS ASSEMBLED AT NELLIE BY BEATING OF DRUMS (.) MINORITY PEOPLES ARE IN PANIC AND APPREHENDING ATTACK ANY MOMENT(.)SUBMISSION FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION TO MAINTAIN PEACE (.)”

The message was dated February 15, 1983. A neat three days before the killings. The warning that could have saved 3,000 lives had been fully ignored at so many places. There wasn’t even an acknowledgement to him. It was written by Zaheruddin Ahmed, station house officer (SHO) or officer commanding (OC) of Nowgong Police Station, to a lot of seniors and stations around Nellie.

As you’d expect, this was the first communication to go behind the strictest secrecy as the cover-up began.

This was the smoking gun and had to be somehow found. How we came to know of its existence and then found it is the story we are telling now. We are also doing something journalists rarely do: Reveal the identity of a source even after decades have passed. Even Mark Felt, the “Deep Throat” in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigations, was outed when enough time had passed. In this case, 38 years have passed since the person died. And I have the concurrence of Arun Shourie to reveal this. This smoking gun was found as part of an investigation that Mr Shourie had led at India Today. I was in transit from the Indian Express and busy writing my book, Assam: A Valley Divided. This is how the story unfolded.

In mid-April, Mr Shourie called to ask if I’d be willing to get involved in an investigation he was planning in order to fix accountability for this bloody fortnight in Assam that February. There was going to be no compensation, not even a byline. Just a labour of love — although, gracious and generous as ever, he did acknowledge my contribution and that of some others in Delhi, including Coomi Kapoor, in the introduction to his article.

The three weeks spent in Assam, mostly Guwahati, working with him were a big lesson on how important it is for investigative journalists to understand the processes of our government system, which he was a master of. If something happened in one place, someone there must have recorded it in such-and-such place too. To cover his backside, if nothing else. Soon enough, we began vacuuming out wireless messages, secret notes, intelligence appraisals, all the things a desperate  “system” was covering up.

We spent days — in fact mostly nights — speaking with top officials of the state administration, police and intelligence agencies. Mr Shourie brilliantly played one emotion: Remember, one day there will be a reckoning, lots of people have died. Somebody will be blamed. It could be you. It worked.

We had heard from sources that there was some wireless message with a specific warning of Nellie. But we didn’t know what it was, who it came from, and who had it now.

Mr Shourie’s skill gave us a break. The Assam Police Special Branch was then headed by Samarendra Kumar Das, an IPS officer of the 1955 batch. He was hated by Assam Movement leaders who saw him as the government’s biggest loyalist. Why don’t we go and work on him, Mr Shourie suggested. I thought it was nuts. If he had this secret, would he reveal his own secret to us?

Das (popularly known as just Samar Das) took pride in being a sterling interrogator. But he wilted under Mr Shourie’s persistent “but who was the head of intelligence, Mr Das? You will be blamed”. The fear of being the fall guy became so strong that one late night he blurted out the truth. Yes, there is a wireless, he said. O/C Nowgong sent it out.

Now we asked, pleaded, even begged him to give us a copy. He said he’d do no such thing. But, finally, he told us where we could find it. The O/C (SHO) of Nowgong police station, Zahiruddin Ahmed, he said, had a copy. He was deeply upset and angry, he said. Das passed away in 1985, 38 years ago.

It was for me to find this wireless from Nowgong Police Station.

In the 2014 general election, I was travelling across Assam. I thought I’d make a stop at Nellie as well. Samudragupta Kashyap, then The Indian Express correspondent there, reminded me of what the Assamese think of visiting reporters when we stop at Nellie: The usual journalistic pilgrimage.

I knew the joke was on me. But for me, it was a different kind of pilgrimage. Because, I had memories to check out, find some places, and people.

That evening in May 1983, the day after that conversation at Samar Das’s home, I had driven to Nowgong. It was dark by the time I reached the police station. The OC, Zahiruddin Ahmed, was not there. But somebody confirmed what Das had told us. That he had recently turned very religious and quiet. He felt the guilt of failing to prevent the terrible massacre and was probably in the nearby mosque.

I walked there, and found a lone, bearded, Maulana-like figure hunched in prayer. I sat next to him, waiting. Once I caught his eye, I told him the purpose of my visit. I am not sure whether he already had tears in his eyes, or if my presence made him cry. He said, son, I would never betray a police secret. But you have asked me in a masjid, and somebody must be punished for the death of 3, 500 Muslims, so come with me.

He walked me back to the police station and opened that log book. Remember, this was 1983. There were no photocopiers in Nowgong. And who’d let you take the log book out? So ,I exposed two full films in my Minolta with an ordinary lens while he had the log book open in one hand and the wire holding a tiny lightbulb in low-voltage light in the quivering other. It is that facsimile that was published on the cover of India Today, with Arun Shourie’s story. OC Ahmed passed away nearly two decades ago. His son, I was told, teaches at a college. His was a story of heroism, not betrayal. It must be told.

At Nellie, Mohammed Nur Islam, 59, the Maulvi of a new mosque, talked to me about watching his mother getting killed in Alisingha, in the same 10-village cluster. But his is also a story of resilience and revival. Two of his six children now worked in Chennai and Kerala, respectively. His oldest daughter was pursuing post-graduation in Islamic studies in Shimoga. The other children were all studying, with two of his other daughters doing science, at a junior college.

What happened in 1983 was politics, he said. He speaks Assamese, but is originally a Bengali, of Mymensinghia ancestry in Bangladesh, which has been reviled and stereotyped for nearly a century for its land-hunger and illegal migration: “Wheresoever the carcass, there the vultures will be gathered… whither there is vacant land, thither goes the Mymensinghia, ” wrote C S Mullen, the British Census chief in 1931. It became an inspiration for the anti-foreigner movement.

Today, the same Mymensinghias at Nellie have rebuilt their lives and their children are definitely doing better than those of the Lalung tribals across the new highway who came that day with swords and spears and carried out a pogrom without comparison before or after, and for which nobody has yet been punished..

(The series concludes)

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