Abdul Rehman
Kallan Shaikh
then 61, lost a 20-year-old son
He never went back to the spot except to collect what he believed were his son’s ashes. Fourteen years ago, for Abdul Rehman Kallan Shaikh, now 75, that was the last sign of his young son.
Abdul Mannan, 20 years old and with a slight limp due to polio, was killed by a mob in Pratiksha Nagar, Sion, a central Mumbai locality, as the riots spread across the city in 1993. Mannan was accompanying his sister Ghazala Bano out for some work when they saw their local mosque ablaze. Mannan ran towards the masjid to check on the imam, since the aazan call had already rung out. He managed to rescue the imam, trapped in the blazing room under a collapsed roof.
That brave act did not deter the mob. As they ran towards the two siblings, Mannan told Ghazala to run. “They won’t do anything to me. The three who are leading the mob are my friends, he assured Ghazala,” Shaikh remembers his daughter telling him.
The three did not spare Mannan, however. Instead they attacked him with swords and burnt him to death, before his sister. “For days after that we didn’t know where he was. I was not in Mumbai then. When I returned and started making enquires, she asked me not to do much. That’s when she really poured out about what had happened,” says Shaikh, sitting at his small home in MHADA colony in Goregaon (East).
Shaikh lost most of his property—the colony was destroyed in the rioting. Over the years, he lost four of his other sons too. A few months ago, a local court hearing his son’s case asked his daughter, now settled in the Middle East, to appear before it.
But Shaikh has no faith in the justice-dispensing mechanism. “Main akela hoon, kya kiya jaye? The least they could have done is punished the police officers who stood and watched. But instead, they were promoted. What can you expect in the form of justice then?” questions Shaikh.
After all these years of waiting for action to be taken on the Srikrishna Commission report, he has no hope that the current assurances will bear any fruit. “Humko unse wafah ki nahi hai ummeed joh jante nahi wafah kya hai (I have no expectations of loyalty from those who don’t even know what loyalty is),’’ he says bitterly.
— Swatee Kher

... contd.