The mourning wasn’t even over when Singh heard of 48 men being picked up by PAC jawans in Hashimpura and the killings that followed. Religion never came to Singh’s mind as he decided to reach out to the families.

“The men who killed my son were just criminals and anti-social elements —- not Muslims or Hindus,” he says. According to him, any person capable of the inhuman acts of murder, rape, plunder or loot is not fit to be called religious or even human.

While Singh met each victim’s family and offered his support, Yameen was in jail at the time. Following his release two years later, he immediately got to work. “I just knew I had to help them,” Yameen says. “So I started getting in touch with officials I knew to get the case registered and heard in a court of law.” A year later, Yameen’s son fell to the town’s communal tension when he was killed by a “Muslim” mob for trying to protect the neighbourhood munshi. The year was 1990, and BJP leader L K Advani’s Rath Yatra had heightened religious passions. Tariq Arshad was slaughtered in broad daylight on the main road near his house.

It wasn’t religion that killed his son at the age of 24, Yameen knew. “They were just caught in the frenzy of fundamentalist sentiments encouraged by politicians,” he says. Two decades later, according to Yameen and Singh, Hashimpura still bears the imprint of the 1987 incident. Yameen says it left the lives of “decent folk and small-time entrepreneurs shattered for generations”, while Singh notes that “Hashimpura people are all semi-skilled labourers and after 1987, they have been missed in markets”.

... contd.