How Pappu Qureishi can help government trace affected families
MUMBAI: A month ago, the Supreme Court (SC) ordered the Maharashtra government to set up a committee to trace families who were not compensated for the deaths of their loved ones during Mumbai’s ’92-’93 riots. Once the committee is set up, the government should make Pappu Qureishi its point person to help it network with families awaiting payment.
Thanks to the efforts of Qureishi and the late Farid Batatawala, 60 of the 165 who were officially listed as missing (67 Muslim, 98 Hindu) managed to get the ₹ 2 lakh compensation. Their efforts to help the rest failed, in the face of an unyielding administration. Even today, 70-year-old Qureishi can produce a list of those who were denied compensation and the reason for it. For instance, when Gita Sarkar’s father arrived from Kolkata to make enquiries about her, police told him that she had been kidnapped and sold off to a bar owner, and she must have fled. The wives of Maqsood Ahmed and Valiullah Khan – Antop Hill residents – came from UP to trace their husbands, who as employees of the UP State Bridge Corporation, were working on a bridge in Navi Mumbai before they went missing during the riots. Officials at the Collector’s office told them to get documents from the UP Corporation, and pursue their claims there. They were not the only ones to return disappointed. Ishraful Ansari went missing from Jogeshwari. His mother was traced after the Mumbai Suburban Collector’s Office wrote to its counterpart in UP. In Mumbai she was asked to produce an heirship certificate from the Collectorate in UP. “She told me that would be difficult,” recalled Qureishi. Madina Mohammed Sayyed’s case is the most poignant. Sayyed’s mother carried a slip of a paper from Trombay Police Station showing that he was missing from December 8, 1992; his name had been cleared for compensation in 2001. However, tired of waiting for her husband, Sayyed’s wife remarried in 1996. The only way she could do so under Muslim law was by declaring that her husband had been missing for over four years. So she signed an affidavit that Sayyed had disthe appeared in 1991. The Trombay police decided to believe this affidavit rather than the “missing” entry made by its own staff in 1992, and the compensation was denied. In 2002, Medina’s mother Salma Bi died, worried sick not just about her orphaned granddaughter’s future, but also the interest mounting on the ₹15,000 loan she had taken at 10% interest just to claim the compensation. Of that, ₹6200 was the stamp duty on the Indemnity Bond all families of missing persons had to sign in case the missing person returned. According to law, a missing person is presumed dead after seven years, but the Congress-ncp government that came to power in 1999 refused to waive the Indemnity Bond even after 2000. Families were also required to produce ration cards and NOCS from the local police that no criminal case is pending against the missing. Many lost their ration cards when their homes were destroyed in the riots but the government refused to accept any other proof of residence. Getting NOCS from the police was no easy task either.
Government data on missing persons was full of inconsistencies in their affidavits in the SC. The list of the missing kept changing, as did the reasons for compensation being denied. The two Collectors’ offices failed to follow up with counterparts from other states. The petitioners urging implementation of the B N Srikrishna Commission Report underscored this to the SC, but all they got were adjournments. The SC’S latest order has given them a ray of hope again, and Pappu Qureishi could be a good resource – he also has a list of riot victims whose families were denied compensation, despite the bodies of their loved ones being found, for lack of a death certificate.