A LYNCHING IN DIMAPUR

On 5 March, a journalist with a local newspaper left the rally he was covering in Dimapur’s bazaar for his house. It was around 11 am. The speakers were done with their speeches. The protestors, mostly students, were done with their slogans. The crowd was gradually dispersing. The anger over the past few days over the alleged rape of a local Naga girl had resulted, he thought, in just a protest.

But later that afternoon, a call informed him that a large crowd had now gathered at the Dimapur Central Jail, a prison that lies on the outskirts of this city in Nagaland, and was demanding that the alleged rapist be handed over to them.

By the time the journalist tried to catch up with the mob, its most agitated members had already broken into the prison, grabbed their target, and were headed with their captive to the city’s main bazaar. He met a crowd so large, he says, it looked like all of Dimapur had descended there. Swallowed by this euphoric mass of humanity, the journalist caught a fleeting sight of the centre of the action. People were taking turns to tug at a rope. At the other end of it, being dragged along the street, caked in dust and blood, was the battered figure of a man.

The journalist, crushed in the crowd, had to walk without purpose and intention in whichever direction the mob willed him. By the time the crowd reached the Clock Tower that stands at the junction of three streets, the sky above had transformed from the pale brightness of late afternoon into complete darkness.

Sitting in a tea stall now, the journalist, requesting anonymity, considers what he saw as his finger traces the rim of an untouched glass of tea. “When the crowd reached the Tower, I looked around, you know,” he says. “Every balcony, roof and window of houses around the Tower was filled with the silhouettes of people with cellphone cameras. And then suddenly, a huge cheer went around.” The dead body had been successfully strung up at the Clock Tower.

Dimapur is a melting pot of ethni- cities. Like many other Indian cities, it has grown around its railway station. When the British first extended the railway line to this distant region of Northeast India, and followed it with the establishment of schools and hospitals, and later an airport, it began to attract people from various parts of the country. Among them were Marwaris and Muslims from neighbouring states who brought commerce to this emerging city. There were also several Nepalis and Tibetans. And then there were several different Naga tribes, many of which had arrived en masse from different parts of what are now Nagaland, Manipur and Myanmar after the state of Nagaland was carved out of Assam in 1963.

All of them have lived more or less harmoniously, conversing in Nagamese, a pidgin dialect derived from Assamese and intelligible to the various tribes and ethnicities living in this region, and developing the city into the commercial capital of Nagaland. You don’t even need an Inner Line Permit to enter this city, like you do in the rest of Nagaland.

But over the years, the city has stagnated while migrants, argue the locals, have continued to arrive. There are very few business opportunities here now, and those that exist are operated mostly by non-Nagas. Government jobs are highly coveted and fiercely contested. And in these years, as the population has boomed and resources have dwindled, the resentment of local Nagas has turned into ire towards whom they disparagingly call the ‘miya log’ or IBIs— illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.

Everything, from the moral decay of the city to its shrinking resources, is now blamed on IBIs, who they believe have been arriving in large numbers and destroying the Naga value system. This issue had been festering unchecked for several years, waiting for a release.

Syed Sarifuddin Khan was raised along with six other brothers in a village called Bosla in Assam’s Karimganj district. His father had retired from the Military Engineering Service, and two of his elder brothers, Syed Jamaluddin Khan and Syed Kamaluddin Khan, worked with the Assam Rifles regiment of the Indian Army. Another brother, Syed Imanuddin Khan, who also worked in the Army, had been injured during the Kargil War of 1999 and died a few years later. Sarifuddin, however, was not keen on a career in the armed forces. So, in his early twenties, he travelled to Dimapur, a city where his uncle lived and from whom he had heard of its limitless opportunities.

Sarifuddin started off by running a small shoe store in Dimapur. He also got two of his younger brothers, Suberuddin and Nasiruddin, to move to the city with him. He met a Naga girl, Holy, a member of the Sema tribe whom he fell in love with and married. She also bore him a daughter, who is now around three years old. After a few years, he came up with a new business idea. He would travel to Guwahati in Assam and bring used cars from there to sell in Dimapur for a profit. A year ago, he moved to the city’s outskirts. He lived here in a two-room house, one among many such houses in a largely vacant compound.

According to his neighbours, Sarifuddin would be gone from Dimapur for days on end to Guwahati, sometimes with his brothers and sometimes alone. When he was home, he kept to himself and away from the rest of the neighbourhood. He was also known to return home drunk. One night, a neighbour remembers, he returned late and drunk, and wanted to pick a fight with his neighbours for having locked the gate of the compound.

After the incident of 5 March, when Rahman, the working president of the Muslim Council of Dimapur, tried to trace Sarifuddin’s antecedents, he found that he stayed aloof from the rest of the Muslim community in the city. There was no record of him in any Dimapur mosque. “He was a bit of a ruffian and would always be picking fights. He had been asked to leave from his previous home, and the caretaker of the current accommodation had also asked him to vacate the premises for being unruly.”

A few doors away from his house lived the distant cousin of his wife, a first-year college student.

On 24 February, the college student filed a case of rape against Sarifuddin. According to her, on the previous night, she had gone out with a common acquaintance, a Naga local named Nikavi, for a late night snack. Sarifuddin was also present. After Nikavi excused himself, on the pretext of taking a friend’s call, Sarifuddin drove off with the young girl. He allegedly got her drunk and raped her several times in a forest on the outskirts of the city and in a hotel. “The next morning, Sarifuddin allegedly threatened her [against] filing a complaint and gave her Rs 5,000,” says Wabang Jamir, Inspector General of Police (Range), “According to Sarifuddin’s version of events, the sex was consensual.” Claims Nasiruddin, Sarifuddin’s brother, “She told us if we give her Rs 2 lakh, she would withdraw the case.”

Sarifuddin was arrested and lodged in Dimapur Central Jail.

Reportedly, CCTV footage that shows Sarifuddin and the student checking into the hotel, without the appearance of any force on his part, has now been circulating online, leading many to question the claims of rape.

A few days after the charges were filed, local papers got wind of the matter. They assumed he was an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant, and carried provocative articles about the case. One of the headlines in Nagaland Post, the most-widely read daily in the city, read, ‘IBI rapes woman in DMU (Dimapur)’. It also had condemnations from influential Naga groups that issued a statement saying the heinous crime had exposed ‘Naga weaknesses’ and asked all Nagas to take responsibility for checking the alleged menace of the IBI influx; else, they said, crimes against ‘women and daughters will only increase’.

The popular mood turned vitriolic, and protest demonstrations began to be held. One such procession reached the District Commissioner’s office, where angry young women demanded that the alleged rapist be handed over to them. The police asked them to calm down. Another group, perhaps a splinter of the protest rally that marched to the DC’s office, unsatisfied with the police’s explanations, began to target shops owned by Muslims in the city’s Naya Bazaar area. According to Rahman, around 100 Muslim-owned shops were broken into and vandalised. Some men even tried to torch a few. The police claim they imposed a curfew then. “Around 1,000 Bangladeshi families, sensing that trouble was brewing, began to leave Dimapur and its nearby regions in the next few days,” Rahman says.

Around this time, online Naga groups got active with hate messages aimed at Bangladeshis. Two groups on Facebook in particular, The Naga Blog and Naga Spears, began to bristle with outrage. According to Nilim Dutta, director of the Strategic Research & Analysis Organisation, inflammatory messages were being posted on The Naga Blog, where members were boasting of their roles in the rioting and looting, and calling others to regroup for further action. When Dutta protested, he says, he was blocked by the blog.

The interrogations of those accused of being part of the mob that lynched Sarifuddin, according to the police, also confirm that many of them participated in mob violence after engaging in enraged conversations on Facebook.

Some people had pushed their way into Sarifuddin’s house a few nights earlier. They had, according to Nasiruddin, who was present that night, threatened him and made him list out his family members and provide the address of their native village on a piece of paper. That night, as a ruckus ensued in the streets and bazaars, Nasiruddin was away from home. He got a call from Sarifuddin’s wife telling him that people had come again and were looking for him. “She told me to run away. It wasn’t safe anymore,” recalls Nasiruddin, who along with his brother Suberuddin boarded a train back to Guwahati, and then to Karimganj.

The police relaxed the curfew for a peace rally the following morning. According to one police official, it seemed the right thing to do. Without a platform to air their frustrations, he says, the authorities felt they could have turned even more hostile. The rally was organised by the Naga Students’ Federation, and various groups delivered speeches about how Bangaldeshis were taking away their resources and destroying their culture. (Since the lynching, these groups have denied any role in mobilising the mob, claiming that they had only organised and spoken at a peaceful rally.)

In the afternoon, huge groups of people began to gather and demonstrate outside Dimapur Central Jail. The agitators tore down the wire mesh fencing around the premises, began pelting stones at the security forces, and had soon pushed open the main gate that led to the prison. “We couldn’t shoot them because there were young women right in front,” a senior police official says. “Imagine if we had shot them? Nagaland would have been burning by now.”

According to a report—leaked and aired on CNN-IBN—prepared by Chuba Phom, the now-suspended senior superintendent of the jail, the prison authorities had informed several higher-ups of the escalating trouble, from the District Commissioner and Superintendent of Police of Dimapur to the Prison Headquarters chief in Kohima, all of whom promised assistance and police reinforcement. But locals report that protestors had blocked National Highway 29, which connects the city to Nagaland’s capital Kohima and also towns and cities in Manipur and Assam.

The agitators who stormed the prison ransacked the offices, vandalised the barracks, broke down other gates, and moved from cell to cell, threatening jail officials and prisoners alike, on a hunt for Sarifuddin with a picture of his on their cellphones for identification. According to the police, some police personnel tried to restrain the crowd by firing blank shots and tear gas shells, but the mob overpowered them.

According to a senior police officer, the above events took a little over an hour. By Phom’s report, the break-in and search lasted for two to three hours. No police reinforcements came for assistance. In the melee, a few prisoners tried to escape. Some were caught immediately, but two prisoners, both NSCN-IM militants, Aaon Wangsu and Lutose, have been missing ever since. The police officer claims the mob was about to give up their search, when some of them realised that they had not checked a row of cells at the northeastern corner behind the common barracks. They found Sarifuddin, hidden by jail authorities, in one of the toilets of that separate row. “They beat and stripped him in the courtyard,” the officer says. “And they took him to be hung at the Clock Tower.”

The mob took Sarifuddin along NH29 past church buildings and bungalows, shops and houses. They thrashed him as they passed his house. Photos and videos of this procession made their way around the city, as people gathered at various public places to either watch or participate in the violence. The crowd kept swelling, making its way through the seven odd kilometres from the prison to the Clock Tower in the city square. It took roughly three hours, say the police, who claim there were also children and their mothers who came to watch the procession.

At some point in the journey, according to Rahman, some members of the crowd realised that Sarifuddin would not be able to make it alive to the city centre. So they asked people to refrain from assaulting him anymore. But a large contingent of violent youngsters was reportedly waiting, midway, at the city’s Purana Bazaar. After the hard bashing he was subjected to there, he fell motionless, perhaps dead. This is when he was dragged along the road for the rest of the way. By some accounts, his body was also dragged by a motorbike for some part of the route.

Another senior police officer, requesting anonymity, claims that the police tried to fight the crowd and retrieve Sarifuddin several times, but every attempt was beaten back by stone pelters and other forceful rowdies. Showing a photograph of the huge crowd that had assembled at Clock Tower, the police officer says, it was like a scene out of Resident Evil, the video game franchise of a zombie outbreak that has been made into several films. “It was like everyone had turned into zombies that night,” he says.

The police was finally able to disperse the crowd only later at night. They ordered lathi charges, fired tear gas, and later issued orders to shoot at the miscreants below their waists. “As the gunshots echoed through the town, I knew it was never going to be the same again,” says a member of Survival Nagaland, a group that many suspect played a role in inciting the crowd. The group, however, denies any responsibility.

Government vehicles were torched. Many people were injured, and one person succumbed to a bullet wound. Even policemen were injured, and some were shot at, although it is not clear if anyone in the crowd had a gun or if the cops were hit by stray bullets in the police firing.

Sarifuddin’s body was turned over to the Muslim Council of Dimapur before being sent, after much effort by family members and the Assam government, to his native village in Karimganj. The Council had the body washed and offered prayers. “It was so badly scarred and abused,” Rahman remembers, “I didn’t know humans were capable of such depravity.”

It would be unfair, though, to hold Nagas in general responsible for the ugly turn of events in Dimapur. As the particulars of the incident unfold, a deep sense of shame and guilt has descended upon the city. The same newspapers that carried false reports of Sarifuddin being a Bangladeshi have been publishing Opinion and Editorial page articles written by readers and various Naga individuals about the shame that has engulfed the community. There are calls for introspection and repentance. The church is conducting prayer sessions for people to move on. And many individuals are keeping fasts and holding prayer sessions.

“I can’t sleep in the nights thinking of what a sin has been committed on these streets,” says Dominic Sumi, a 36-year- old former police officer who quit the force to become a parish council member at the Holy Cross Church. “What happens to those children whose mothers took them to watch the incident? How do I tell them what they witnessed was unChristian and wrong?” He explains that Dimapur, like the rest of the Northeast, has seen a lot of insurgency and trouble over the years, but its people have remained largely peaceful. “The last time there was trouble here was when there was a bomb blast at the railway station [in 2004],” he says. “And that was because the train was headed to Assam.”

At the time of going to press, 52 individuals have been arrested so far, and look- out notices have been issued for around 24 others. These include teachers and tutors in schools, college students, an autorickshaw driver and an airline employee. “The people arrested came from all walks of life,” says a senior police officer, “It wasn’t like they were miscreants who did not have jobs and families.”

SMS and mobile data services were barred for several days. And curfews were imposed throughout the night. The whole city, with police patrol vehicles and cops everywhere in combat gear, has the feel of being in the midst of a lockdown.

Since the incident, the police have been holding a press conference late every night, apprising journalists of the steps they have taken throughout the day. At these briefings, gasps go around as the police disclose the names of those they have arrested. Additional Superintendent of Police Shouka Kakheto speaks of how a juvenile has been arrested, and how women who were part of the mob will also be taken into custody soon.

“You mean there were women and minors in the crowd too?” a female journalist asks.

“Yes,” the officer replies. And the back- and-forth of queries and answers is suddenly overcome by a deep silence.

Meanwhile, doubts have arisen about the accepted version of events. Many are surprised that the police allowed events to spiral out of control when there were enough indications that the protests of 5 March could turn unruly.

“The protests and the ransacking appeared far too well organised than what is claimed,” says Dutta. “Groups like Survival Nagaland and NSF should be banned and prosecuted because they instigated the crowd,” he says. Survival Nagaland was formed last year with the explicit intention of driving Bangladeshi immigrants out of Nagaland, and its agenda includes conducting a registration drive to check the antecedents of all Muslim families in the city. One of the young members I meet, however, claims the group had no role in the mob that stormed the jail. “We only spoke about the threat of Bangladeshi immigrations on the morning of the protest,” he says. Tongpang Ozukum, president of the NSF, has refused to comment.

Dutta, who was one of the first to realise Sarifuddin was not Bangladeshi, as originally claimed, but belonged to Assam and was able to put that information out online, finds it difficult to believe that the police and jail authorities couldn’t do anything. “There have been many instances in the past when Muslims have faced violence on the pretext of being alleged illegal Bangladeshi immigrants,” he says, “and the state authorities have allowed that to happen.” He points out how, in 2007, the Ao Students Conference in Nagaland started a campaign against alleged Bangladeshi immigrants that led to some 3,000 Muslim residents fleeing Mokokchung in Nagaland. “The Ao Students Conference was never held accountable. In fact, in one of its annual conferences, the then chief minister of Nagaland, Neiphiu Rio, congratulated the group for its successful drive against illegal Bangladeshi immigrants,” he says. “There is a term for such actions, and it is ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

The journalist of the local daily who got caught in the mob’s march to the Clock Tower says he witnessed the police charge against the protestors and the ensuing stone pelting. He reached his office to file a report only to realise that he had lost his pair of slippers.

At midnight, he returned to the scene of the hanging. There was an eerie silence all around, he remembers. The burnt shells of police vehicles were still warm. There was no crowd anymore. Nor even a single individual at a balcony or window. In front of him was the Clock Tower where Sarifuddin had been strung up just a few hours earlier. But there were slippers and shoes everywhere. He looked around, but he could not find his.

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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