Anti-CAA mob tries to burn alive reporter, 32 cops, city magistrate in Meerut
Meerut: A mob of thousands of protesters pushed 32 law enforcement personnel along with a city magistrate and a reporter into a small building and attempted to burn them alive. It was only because of their presence of mind and help that came just when everything was about to be lost that they survived. This is the story from the “protest” they didn’t tell you.
December 20
Hapur Road and Lisadi Gate were the main centres of the violence that erupted last Friday, December 20, when large groups gathered to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens following Friday prayers across the city’s mosques.
Circle Officer (CO) Dinseh Shukla, a city magistrate who has not been named so far, and a detachment of police, Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), and Rapid Action Force (RAF) were deployed on Hapur Road.
The PAC detachment largely comprised of young recruits and most of them had lathis and only a few were armed.
The press corps was also there to cover the protest. Amar Ujala’s Rizwan Khan was embedded along with his photographer with the detachment led by CO Dinesh Shukla and the city magistrate.
Rizwan Khan told The Dispatch that protestors vastly outnumbered the law enforcement personnel and their numbers kept swelling. They soon got aggressive and began to push the personnel back, constantly shouting slogans.
Khan said, “There was stone-pelting from their end and they pushed us back. CO Dinesh Shukla appealed to them not to pelt stones and to not shout aggressive slogans, but they kept getting more aggressive. A stone hit him [CO Dinesh Shukla] in the leg but he still kept on appealing to them to be peaceful.”
Protesters kept getting violent by the minute. The intensity of stone-pelting increased to the extent that the detachment had to retreat from there, fleeing to nearby localities.
PAC’s 30 recruits, two RAF personnel, a city magistrate, and Rizwan Khan were separated from the rest of the detachment as they fled. They took refuge on the ground floor of an empty building in Bhawani Nagar along the Hapur Road. They pulled down the shutter to prevent the mob from getting hold of them.
Khan said, “It was not even a proper shop. It was sort of a gateway to the roof where there was a marketplace of sorts. We went to the roof . There they [mob] surrounded us from all sides from surrounding buildings and began pelting us with stones.
“We were all unarmed except for two RAF personnel who had a rifle and a teargas shell launcher with them. We had to rush back to the ground floor. We shut the door to the roof.
“Large mobs were there outside on the road and on the roof. They secured the door from outside and we were trapped. There was rioting going on outside, stones were being pelted, and there was frequent firing too that we heard from inside.”
The paramilitary personnel informed their superiors of the situation over the phone and a police relief column was dispatched to their aid, but it was beaten back by the mob.
Khan said that tear gas shells that were being lobbed outside at the mob in an attempt to disperse them also worsened the situation.
He said, “Shells’ smoke was coming inside through the gap between the shutter and the floor and that was suffocating all of us. We were 34 people in a very cramped space with no source of fresh air. Some PAC recruits even fainted.”
The recruits were increasingly getting hopeless and were making calls to send their last words home. Khan attempted to calm those recruits.
When the mob showed no sign of dispersing and they heard them talking about bringing fuel to set the building afire, Khan said he realised it was a do or die situation and that they had to act quickly.
He said, “To lock the door from inside so that the mob from outside could not get hold of us, I took cloth caps from recruits and tore them to make a rope of sorts. We tied the shutter with the rope that we made in a way that even if they pull the shutter up from outside, it would be held shut from inside.”
His fears soon proved to be true. The mob did try to open the shutter later but Khan’s plan worked. The rope held on. The stone pelting and firing continued outside.
Khan said they were trapped there for more than two hours until CO Dinesh Shukla came to their rescue with the RAF. As per him, a recruit who saw the size of the crowd outside told him there could be as many as 10,000 people out there who were on the streets surrounding them.
“I survived a very big disaster,” Khan told The Dispatch. “Anything could have happened with us, anything, had CO Dinesh Shukla not come to our rescue. The mob was going to burn us alive.”
Khan said that even as the paramilitary personnel informed their superior and even as he made calls, it was only CO Shukla who knew exactly where they were trapped and it was him who rescued them.
“If he would not have come, or if he would have also got caught somewhere like us [by the mob], I wouldn’t be here talking to you,” Khan said.
Madhur Sharma is a student of journalism at IIMC Delhi. He tweets at @madhur_mrt.
This is his first story from Meerut on the agitation and violence that the city has witnessed with regard to the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. Follow this space for more stories on the subject.
