In Covid Times, Burial of a Leg Found in Delhi Riots

As migrants kept marching homeward and middle class families remained shuttered indoors, fearful of dying of Covid-19, the residents of Pilkhuwa village, 45 km from Delhi, stepped out in large numbers to attend the funeral of a human leg. The leg was of Anwar Kassar, 58, who used to live all alone in a tiny shanty in the Shiv Vihar locality of northeast Delhi.

Anwar would tend his goats and rent out push-carts for a living. Then on 25 February northeast Delhi erupted in riots. At 11 am that day, he was on the phone with his daughter Gulshan, who lives in Pilkhuwa with her in-laws, husband and children aged 8 and 9. When she asked about the screams she heard on her father’s end of the line, Anwar told her that lots of young men, “outsiders”, were roaming Shiv Vihar and setting afire Muslim’s properties. “I asked him to get away but they didn’t give him a chance. They killed him on the spot,” Gulshan recalls.

After the call with her father, Gulshan’s 53-day ordeal began. On the same day, 25 February, her uncle Salim, who is an eyewitness to Anwar’s killing, repeatedly called the police. They initially answered his calls, but soon stopped responding. She got news of her father’s death on 26 February from Salim; but it is only through a DNA test that she was deemed his daughter. This report came exactly a month ago, on 16 April, after a lawyer filed a petition on her behalf in the Delhi High Court. By then the entire country was gripped with terror of the coronavirus and the lockdown had been imposed.

For a month starting 26 February, Gulshan went to Delhi every day, trying to get her father’s remains back. “I had to go from Pilkhuwa to Delhi every day for a month because nobody was telling us clearly why his [Anwar’s] body was not being given to us,” she says. “They would tell us come ‘tomorrow’, ‘day-after’, so we kept doing the rounds daily.” A neighbour, her friend, and her mama-mami would accompany her.

But after the lockdown's travel restrictions, she could not go even once. The border between Delhi, where the courts, the police and her father’s remains were, and Uttar Pradesh, where she lives, was sealed. Even movement within the lanes of Pilkhuwa were severely restricted—as they are till today. So her father’s remains languished in a viscera box at the police station in Karawal Nagar near Shiv Vihar. The same lawyer then helped her secure a lower court’s permission to retrieve the remains—just one leg that had escaped the conflagration lit by the rioters in Anwar’s home. Thereafter, Gulshan sought permission from the local police in Pilkhuwa to go to Delhi but they did not help her. On Sunday morning, 17 May, she simply made a dash to the capital and back.

Returning home with her father’s leg, which was stored in a wooden box two feet wide and high, in a small white Maruti Zen Estello driven by a neighbour from Pilkhuwa, she says, “All our expenses, including food and education of my children, were borne by my father. I don’t know how we will live now.” Her husband lost his eyesight in an acid spill four years ago and can no longer work.

The whole country may be anxious about staying alive through the Covid-19 pandemic, but when Gulshan’s drove up to her neighbourhood on Sunday, people started gathering. Outside her in-laws’ residence, she placed the box with her father’s leg on a charpoy covered with a blue and white bed cover. The box sat there for a moment, unattended, in the same state it had been in for the last many days, marked as “case property” and stored in a police maalkhana.

The neighbourhood is aware of how Anwar died. They know he was killed by a mob during the Delhi violence, which deprived Gulshan’s family of a means of living. They know the lockdown prevented her from getting her father’s funeral conducted. Tomar Mohammad, a neighbour in Pilkhuwa, says, “At last Anwar’s daughter has got some closure. Now that she has brought her father’s remains, she will be able to say her final goodbyes.”

“Gulshan’s family needed a lot of help from neighbours to arrange her repeated visits to Delhi even before the lockdown. We saw how hard she tried. Her family also needed help to make ends meet after her father died,” Tomar says. “That’s how they will live now, with help from people.”

Abdul Safoor, Gulshan’s father-in-law, is a slim old man dressed in a pale kurta, with a white beard and heavily-sunken cheeks. He washes bed covers for Pilkhuwa’s famous cotton industry for a living, but is unemployed due to the lockdown. Now he is the only working member in his household of seven. “It is he [Anwar] who used to send the entire expenses of his daughter and her family,” he says, the box with his daughter-in-law’s father on the charpoy next to him.

Gulshan was married at 17. She never attended school, nor learned any trade or skill. The men in her neighbourhood work in the textile business—washing, ironing, dyeing, printing—tasks done by hand and paid for per piece by traders. Her husband Nasiruddin had lost his eyes while dyeing cloth. “My sasur used to send money from Delhi on which we would live. At times we used to go there, at times he came to Pilkhuwa,” Nasiruddin says. The family got a compensation of Rs 1 lakh from the Delhi government after Anwar’s death.

Salim, Anwar’s brother, saw the mob beat, then shoot his brother, burn his home and throw him in the same fire. On 29 February, Gulshan learned from the Karawal Nagar police that Salim had wrested the Rs 1 lakh compensation by falsely claiming he was Anwar’s sole surviving relative.

When she disputed his claim, on the same day, the police collected samples from her and Salim for a DNA test to ascertain their relationship with Anwar. (She had no documentary proof that Anwar was her father.) But on 5 March, the Delhi riot-related cases were transferred to the Crime Branch of Delhi Police. So their samples were only sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Rohini, Delhi, on 6 March.

Until now, the media had reported Gulshan’s case with some interest. The DNA test and dispute over compensation added a sensational element to the human interest story of a woman seeking closure after a horrific crime. But in March the country was gripped by the Novel Coronavirus and a new kind of dread overtook all other narratives.

“Gulshan’s case did not progress once attention turned away from the riots and the spotlight focused on Covid and Tablighi Jamaat and so on,” says her lawyer. Ironically for Gulshan, while fears of Muslims spreading the disease in India were being whipped up, she needed a lawyer and helpful court orders to get the leg of her father, who had died a violent death.

On 8 April the High Court ordered her DNA test result to be delivered within a week. On 16 April, the FSL report arrived, confirming a biological relationship between Gulshan and Anwar. In other words, she is Anwar’s descendant, Salim is not. The next day, 17 April, Gulshan went to the Karawal Nagar police station again. Her father’s leg, initially recovered by the police from his house, had first been sent to the mortuary at GTB hospital, from there to the FSL, and it was now back with the police.

But the police said Gulshan would have to file an application before the northeast district court in Karkarduma if she wanted her father’s remains released. Usually, a police maalkhana stores items that have been seized during the commission of a crime, but Gulshan wanted her father’s leg, not an “object” or “items” that could strictly be termed “possessions”. So there was some confusion as to what kind of application Gulshan must file, and whether the Karkarduma court would accept it (due to the new lockdown-related restrictions).

To top it, there was a glitch in the e-filing process. Finally Gulshan’s application was delivered to a helpful metropolitan magistrate’s court via WhatsApp. By then it was 13 May—36 days after the DNA report. The lawyer’s plea to the court had pointed out that Gulshan had been waiting for almost three months for the release of Anwar’s remains. “‘At least I deserve some closure after my long wait’,” the lawyer says he told the court.

On 14 May the police filed its response—they had no objections. A date was arranged by the court to pick up the body—17 May, Sunday.

“After the lockdown, Sunday, 17 May is the first time I went to Delhi,” Gulshan says in the car on the drive home. As she weeps and sighs and laments her loss, her father’s leg tucked under one arm, she says, “If only he had been in Pilkhuwa the day the riots broke.” But there’s nothing she can do to change what happened.

The leg is all the rioters left in Anwar’s home. All his belongings were burned or stolen. Since an FIR has been filed in his murder case, the police told her that a separate FIR for items lost or damaged cannot be registered. “Now when I call the police they say, ‘ab lockdown ke baad baat karenge iss barey me’—We’ll talk about this case after the lockdown,” Gulshan says.

Back in the village, the men have left for Anwar’s burial. Rihana, a close relative, says, “It has already taken Gulshan so long. Because of Corona, all transportation was stopped. Then the police told her to wait some more since she has alreay been waiting [until after the lockdown]. The DNA report also took time, and her uncle caused delays.” It’s uncertain how much the family can struggle to get justice in the murder case now.

The populist narrative against Muslims being carriers of the coronavirus has also upset and angered Gulshan’s neighbourhood. “The virus came from abroad. So it is the job of our country to check its arrival—why did you [the government] not check it?,” says Sabir Ali, a relative. “Even now there is bhaichara between Hindus and Muslims. We worry only about our livelihood. It’s going to be tough to find work even after the lockdown,” he says.

The word “bhaichara”—brotherhood—persistently echos in our ears on the drive back. On Monday there’s fresh news, another Jamia Millia Islamia student, a Muslim, has been picked up by Delhi police. Miles from the narrative of arrests and “goli maaro saalon ko” Gulshan is trying to piece together the scattered remains of her life.