Delhi riots: Police crack down on fake messages, 40 accounts suspended Investigators said that these accounts were circulating fake images and videos to spread rumours and had been broadcasting.
- Riots during a blackout in New York on July 13-14, 1977, left two dead, 200 injured, 1,616 stores looted, and 40 city blocks destroyed, for a total $290 million in damage (about $1 billion today).
- The computer uses only 0 and 1 as bits. The other numbers felt left behind and started a riot. Soon all the 1 bits joined the riot, All except one. The alpha 1 bit. You will play as the alpha zero bit, you will try to restore order, find the alpha 1 bit and then together to battle the riot leader.
- 'A city lay in travail, God our Lord, and from her loins sprang twin Murder and Black Hate. Red was the midnight; clang, crack and cry of death and fury filled the air and trembled underneath the stars when church spires pointed silently to Thee,' wrote W. Du Bois in September 1906 in the wake of one of Atlanta's darkest moments—the 1906 Race Riot.
Bhagalpur 1989 is remembered as the forgotten riot. It slipped through the cracks between Delhi 1984 and Mumbai 1993. By 1990, reports were already calling Bhagalpur the forgotten riot, pushed aside by the Lalu Prasad government in Bihar, which spent its energies on putting up an ideological resistance to the anti-reservation agitations sweeping across the country.
Later, in Nitish Kumar’s Bihar, Bhagalpur would go through feeble resurrections around election time. Soon after he became chief minister in 2005, Nitish Kumar set up a new commission of inquiry under Justice NN Singh, as if to send out the signal that his government would prioritise minorities along with its other backward constituencies. In 2013, a few months before the Lok Sabha elections, he doubled the pension for 384 riot-affected families. Now the state polls are around the corner again, and the NN Singh committee report, submitted after several extensions, was tabled in the assembly last Friday.
The report recommends action against 125 IAS and IPS officers. Opera for mac os sierra. It also indicts the Congress state government of the time. We’ve heard this story before in the Justice Srikrishna Commission report, which probed the Mumbai riots. A Congress government guilty of “effete political leadership” and an “in built” communal bias, a state apparatus either negligent or complicit which meant the riots spread like wildfire, the casualty lists swelled with names from the minority community.
Yet in popular memory, it was Mumbai that became inextricably linked to the blood and fury that accompanied the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The noise over Bhagalpur hardly travelled outside the state. It should not have been so. If the Mumbai riots were the bitter aftermath of the demolition, Bhagalpur should have warned of Babri.
October 1989
In his book, Mofussil Junction, Ian Jack calls Bhagalpur a “mean and unrewarding town built on the silts of the Ganges in Bihar”. A report compiled by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights in 1996 notes how Bhagalpur district had a history of communal violence, breaking out in 1924, 1936, 1946 and 1967. But it had never spread to the rural areas of the district before. The years leading up to the riots had seen horrifying state brutality: at least 30 undertrials from Bhagalpur town were blinded by the police in 1980.
It was in this sullen landscape that the Ramjanmabhoomi mobilisations gathered force. Members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad travelled through the district, collecting bricks for the Ram temple and conducting pujas. In August 1989, there were tensions during Bisheri Puja and Muharram celebrations in Bhagalpur town. Then the rumours started, of 200 Hindu bodies dumped in a well in Parbatti, an area in Bhagalpur town. Javed Iqbal, in a photo essay on the riots, says it was later found that there were 12 bodies, not 200, and they were all family members of one Mohammad Javed. On October 24, Ramshila processions cutting across the countryside were to converge in Bhagalpur town.
The riots are said to have started when one of the “peaceful processions” passed through the Muslim locality of Tatarpur, where hidden miscreants lobbed bombs and brick bats at them. Several aspects of this account are contested. First, Tatarpur was not part of the route officially sanctioned for the procession but the police and administration let it pass through anyway. Second, members of the procession reportedly sported swords and chanted slogans like “Baccha baccha Ram ka, baaki sab haraam ka' (We are all children of Ram, the rest are illegitimate), not exactly striking a peaceful note. Third, according to some sources, the bombs could not be traced and nobody was killed in the incident.
But it was reason enough for the rioting to begin. From October 24 to 27, when the army was finally called in, the state receded as violence raged across the district. In Chanderi, Muslim residents huddled together in one house as the mobs drew near. After the security cover was called off, they closed in, killing at least 70 people in one night. In Parbatti and Timoni, Muslim families fled as their houses were looted and set alight. Those who stayed behind were cut down by the mobs, who did not spare children and old people. The cauliflowers fields of Logain would later become famous. They covered a mass grave containing more than 100 bodies.
Marooners download free download. The violence continued into November, spreading to at least 195 villages. Official sources put the death toll at around 1,000. Others sources say nearly 2,000 were killed. According to the PUDR report, 93% of the dead were Muslim.
Omissions of inquiry
The blurring of the Bhagalpur riots started early, as facts got lost in conflicting probes. The government took refuge in that sarkari staple, an inquiry commission. The Bhagalpur Riots Inquiry Commission was set up by December 1989, to look into the causes of the violence, apportion responsibility and investigate administrative lapses, if any. The commission ran into several delays and was reconstituted midway. After five years, two reports emerged from this commission, each with significant inflections.
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The members’ report, compiled by Justices RCP Sinha and S Shamsul Hasan, indicts communal organisations and sections of the media for spreading rumours. It locates the riots in a longer history of communal politics. It holds the administration guilty of incompetence and indifference, of letting the procession through Tatarpur and failing to maintain the curfew later. It finds Superintendent KS Trivedi “wholly responsible for the riots that occurred”. The fact that the BJP and VHP campaigned against his transfer is held up as proof of the police force’s communal affiliations. Several other figures of the district administration are also blamed for lapses.
The chairman’s report, presented by Justice RN Prasad, advises Indian Muslims to sever ties with “ISI agents… if they wanted restoration of trust in them”. It finds the administration blameless and does not question the official version of the Tatarpur incident. Neither report tried to ascertain the number of the dead.
![Riot Of The Numbers Crack Riot Of The Numbers Crack](/uploads/1/2/1/4/121419917/879903918.png)
It took 16 years for 10 of the accused to be sentenced to life in jail. After Nitish Kumar ordered that 27 cases be reopened, 14 people were convicted in 2007 for the massacre at Logain. In 2009, Kameshwar Yadav, once feted for preserving communal harmony, was convicted for murdering a 15-year-old Muslim boy. Other cases drag on, with victims fighting in vain for compensation or even the recognition that crimes had taken place, that life, property and livelihoods had been lost.
Guilty secret
In 1995, the Lalu Prasad government accepted the Justice Prasad report as the official version, choosing not to probe the question of administrative culpability. Indeed, in the post-Babri era, all the parties active in the state seemed to enter a tacit pact not to bring up the Bhagalpur riots. So the violence of 1989 seemed to fade from the larger politics of the state and beyond. But it left a memory trace that showed in the politics of the next two decades. Some parties mined this to perfection in Bhagalpur, others lost out.
For the Congress, which presided over the violence, it was curtains in Bihar. Then Chief Minister Satyendra Narayan Sinha was forced to step down and the Congress sought to undo the damage by replacing him with Jagannath Mishra, said to be popular with Muslims for making Urdu the official second language of Bihar. It didn't work. The Muslim vote shifted firmly from the Congress to Lalu Prasad, then part of the Janta Dal. Sinha later wrote bitterly of state party leaders 'fanning' communal tensions for personal gain.
Lalu Prasad's glory days began in the wake of the riots but even he is perceived to have gone soft on the prosecutions. A number of the prime accused belonged to his community, the Yadavs, who became politically prominent in the district soon after the riots. But as the man who halted L.K. Advani's rath yatra in 1990, Lalu didn't need to prove his secular chops. He was projected as the protector of minorities, and the Muslim-Yadav alliance endured for 15 years. For most of the '90s, this ensured political gains in Bhagalpur, even though Lalu had done precious little about justice for the riots.
![Riot Riot](https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2011/09/01/vancouver_police_lost_control_before_the_puck_dropped_riot_report_finds/vancouverriot.jpeg)
The BJP, which was linked to the agitations that led to the riots, waited out the better part of the '90s. But the party had deep roots in Bhagalpur, a major centre for trade and fertile ground for the growth of the RSS in Bihar. The polarisation left behind by the riots also helped create an active Hindutva constituency. From the late '90s, the Bhagalpur Lok Sabha constituency has returned a BJP candidate. In 2006, it became that rare constituency which voted for a Muslim BJP candidate, Shahnawaz Hussain, even though it was not a Muslim majority district. The Hindutva vote, combined with a section of the minority vote pulled by the Muslim candidate, helped the BJP win.
Yet in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the issue of riot prosecutions was drowned out by the 'Modi wave'. In the end, Shahnawaz Hussain lost by a narrow margin to the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Shailesh Kumar Mandal. According to one analysis, the Muslims voted in a block to stall the Modi wave.
At the national level, the 2000s created new polarising figures, as Advani gave way to Modi, and new images of communal violence, as Mumbai 1993 gave way to Gujarat 2002. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar tried to use the Bhagalpur prosecutions to establish his secular credentials. But the 2014 Lok Sabha polls seem to suggest the old anxieties have merged into the new. It remains to be seen whether the NN Singh report can throw the fading memories of Bhagalpur into sharp relief once again.
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Loaded on Oct. 15, 2000 published in Prison Legal News October, 2000, page 16
By Bill DunneBetween October 19 and October 26, 1995, the U. S. Bureau of Prisons (federal prison system) experienced a series of largely spontaneous but causally related uprisings in its then 84 prison, 100,000 prisoner gulag archipelago. Involving a range of demonstrations and direct action, this widespread rebellion ignited by injustices in the imposition and execution of prison sentences was unprecedented in the history of the BOP (Bureau of Prisons). Though its participants caused no deaths, took no hostages, and breached no secure perimeter, their exclamation of discontent resulted in the first nationwide lockdown of federal penitentiaries and correctional institutions and cost $39.7 million.
The BOP's After Action Report: October 1995 Disturbances seeks to ascribe the events to external factors beyond BOP control and absolve the prisonocracy of responsibility for the crisis. Officialdom specifically blames congressional refusal to reduce the gross disparity between sentences for crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses (and media reporting thereon) for causing the revolt. The report claims there was no advance indication that any such action was likely or imminent, and no subsequent indication that internal factors of prison policy, practice, or administration played a significant role. On the basis of this assessment, the report recommends only increasing the repressive capabilities of prison authorities.
The report describes the uprising as 'a series of major and minor institution disturbances.' Fifty incidents, from Allenwood, PA., to Lompoc, CA., and Marianna, FL., to Sheridan, OR, were briefly mentioned, but just 10 were deemed serious enough to be 'the subject of full after-action reviews' and sufficiently related to be covered in any detail in the national level report. To be sure, many of the incidents were relatively trivial as reported, but only the BOP really knows how many incidents, and of what scope and provenance, actually occurred.
The rebellion began at about 6:15 P.M. CDT on October 19, 1995, at FCI (Federal correctional Institution) Talledega, AL. 'Several hundred' prisoners assembled in the yard where many armed themselves with bats and other makeshift weapons and donned masks. From there they proceeded to essentially take over the inside of the prison, breaking windows and setting fires throughout. Braving chemical sprays, they refused all orders to stop. Some 'indicated' they were motivated by a desire to change the crack laws. The report did not say what other motivations were articulated. A half-hour after the 'disturbance' began, the warden authorized firearms inside the institution. Guards and local police then confronted the prisoners with pistols, shotguns, and M-16 rifles. Many 'warning' shots, gas rounds, and threats forced prisoners back into the units where more of the same forced them into the cells. By 8:00 P.M. the guards had regained control.
The insurrections at FCI Allenwood and FCI Memphis followed similar trajectories. At about 7:00 A.M. on October 20,1995, a large group of prisoners assembled in FCI Allenwood's general compound. From there they moved to food service, housing units, and recreation areas, setting fires, breaking windows, and doing other damage. A 7:15 lockdown announcement was ignored by about 100 prisoners who continued their activates, battled guards, and encouraged other prisoners to join them. Guards with shotguns and DCT's (disturbance control teams) were then deployed. The housing units were secured and by 9:00 A.M. the yard was cleared as well.
The FCI Memphis revolt began at noon the same day. Approximately one hundred fifty to two hundred prisoners gathered on the yard, the only reason given in the report being to protest the congressional vote against rationalizing the crack laws. Another 200 in Unicor (Federal Prison Industries) refused to work, broke windows and equipment, and eventually joined the others on the yard. At about 1:00 P.M. demands were made, and rejected, for a senator, a congressperson, and media to come to the prison. By 2:45 PM, fires in at least two units were burning out of control, Unicor had been trashed, and a BOP camera crew had been dissuaded from videotaping prisoners' actions. The command center ordered all staff members to evacuate the prison.
Riot Of The Numbers Cracking
Then DCT's and SORT's (special operations response teams) from several other BOP facilities, plus some 200 state and local police, as well as FBI SWAT (Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Weapons and Tactics) agents armed with pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles, submachine guns, and M-16 rifles, as well as the usual complement of noxious chemicals, counterattacked. Prisoners were herded into the gym, chapel, and Unicor and bound with plastic restraints. By 8:00 A.M. on October 21, 1995 all the fires were out and all prisoners were either subdued in locked units or shackled down on BOP busses inside the prison.
In reaction to these events, guards at all federal prisons were placed on a higher state of alert. The BOP director ordered the nationwide lockdown at 3:57 P.M. EDT on October 20,1995. The abrasive manner in which guards imposed the lockdown, cursing prisoners and demanding they instantly lock in the cells at an unusual time without explanation, caused the FCI Greenville (IL) resistance. Verily, the manner in which the lockdown was imposed and conducted was a major contributing if not the causal factor in other incidents as well, a fact the report does not directly admit but implicitly acknowledges.
The variety in extent and character of the many subsequent skirmishes comprising the October rebellion reflected the varying degree of lockdown between institutions. The lockdown prevented any of them from becoming as extensive as those above. Nevertheless, actions ranged from serious resistance that reached multiple parts of the prisons (and included fighting, losses of control, and significant destruction), through group demonstrations (such as refusal to work, refusal to lock-up, throwing trash and projectiles, and lighting fires), to isolated and anonymous trash can fires and fixture damage. The report purports there was no retaliation against prisoners for the rebellion. Prisoners, however, tell a far different story. Hundreds did long SHU (special housing unit, aka, 'the hole') time and hundreds more were transferred to more punitive prisons with little regard for what infiaction they may have committed, if any. Many were beaten and otherwise abused, while in full restraints and unresisting, in the transfer process. Others were left bound and given no opportunity to wash off the various caustic chemicals with which they'd been doused for long periods. Still others were pushed and hit while bound and forced to run 'gauntlets' as they were driven to housing units and SHUs. Some of the get-back came later in the form of pretextual physical abuse, harsh searches, withholding of materiel like bedding and clothing, food contamination, and destruction of personal property. Medical attention was denied or inadequate in many instances or only enough to protect prison officials from obvious liability. And over 1,400 infraction reports were written.
The report's allegation that congressional refusal to reduce crack cocaine sentences to parity with other cocaine sentences was the sine qua non of the whole chain of actions is disingenuous at best. It acknowledges that 'immediate precipitating incidents were closely intertwined with a number of more complex underlying causes,' but hammers out frequent repetitions of that one cause with astonishingly small attention to others, until it becomes the only common factor. It does acknowledge prisoner perceptions of unfairness but does not explore them, an egregious omission from a document from which effective preventive measures are to derive. Though the sentencing disparity was ample cause for discontent and unrest among its victims, the 'underlying factors' were more the cause of the rebellion; the crack reduction vote was merely a precipitator. No single such factor can bear the burden of causality alone.
Among those factors constituting the critical mass for the conflagration was the following: the prison population is increasingly made up with young, black, urban victims of harsh, non-parolable sentences with little opportunity for good time. This population contrasts drastically with the aging, overwhelmingly white, largely rural, conservative prison apparatus. A sharper culture clash couldn't have been deliberately engineered. Further, in 1995, prisoners generally were reaping the results of reactionary politicians opportunistically playing the 'tough on crime' card. College programs were eliminated with the abolition of Pell Grants for prisoners. Vocational training opportunities continued their long decline, especially in higher security prisons. Anti-prisoner legislation was passed which made prison conditions in federal prisons harsher. That emboldened prisoncrats to treat prisoner protection rules and law as only advisory at best and make grievance resolution generally even more of a joke.
Guard brutality was also an issue. The propensity of guards to manhandle prisoners being segregated was the precipitating factor at USP (U. S. Penitentiary) Lewisburg (PA)where it had also caused a mutiny in May 1995. Penurious health services increased suffering and insecurity and, thus, tension. Access to weightlifting and other recreational equipment was being reduced and eliminated at many prisons, as was access to cable TV. Overcrowding was another issue: all ten of the places whose revolts were detailed in the report were one-third to two-thirds over capacity, a situation characteristic of the system. Other conditions of confinement were noticeably deteriorating as well.
All such problems are internal management issues, yet the report mentions none of them and claims there were no management issues inculpated in the October events. Though the BOP attributes the worsening conditions to outside politics, in actuality it took opportunistic advantage of the politics to redistribute resources from prisoner to staff purposes. Evidence thereof is its refusal to implement the less restrictive alternatives it has in these and other operational areas.
Regarding the congressional crack vote specifically, the contention that the BOP had no idea prisoners might respond as they did is either a straight-out lie or an admission of rank incompetence. Since crack cocaine offenses receive sentences which are 100 times longer than the corresponding powder cocaine offense, legions of prisoners feel their legal recourse is no better than grasping at straws. The progress of the legislative proposal to reduce crack sentences was thus followed and discussed intensely, virtually from its introduction. The rationale for the disparity had been exposed as flawed, the disparity itself as counterproductive, and its application as so biased as to be widely regarded as racist. In apparent recognition thereof, even the U. S. Sentencing Commission recommended the reduction. Under these circumstances, many prisoners convinced themselves that congress would--had to--reduce crack penalties. Discussion of the situation was common for months prior to October 1995.
Riot Of The Numbers Cracks
The report admits BOP intelligence-gathering about media reports and prisoner phone calls in the wake of Talledega and to taking action thereon. Also mentioned was routine phone monitoring prior to the action. Indeed, BOP staff routinely monitor all prisoner communication and activity, and talk extensively with prisoners for the purpose of developing information on prisoner attitudes and mood and whatever else may affect prison stability. The many infractions and investigations attributable to such scrutiny attest to the surveillance. That officialdom nationwide nevertheless missed so potentially explosive an issue as one in which a large number of volatile prisoners' hopes of early release were raised to virtual belief is simply not credible.
The report's recommendations explain the BOP's claims of ignorance of the potential for trouble and its unforseeability. In the 192 page report, there is only a single, vague recommendation to '[e]xplore alternative programming for [prisoners] to reduce idleness, in light of the fact that traditional free-time activities are being reduced,' and even that bespeaks a commitment to continued reduction of 'traditional activities.' By making 'external factors' the only reason for prisoner unrest, the BOP absolves itself of its own responsibility for creating potentially explosive tensions through its management priorities and practices, and justifies its policies of more draconian prison regimens. It legitimizes abdication of its correctional authority role in favor of that of an agency of repression.
The $39.7 million price of the rebellion breaks down as follows: overtime, $26.0 million; non-Unicor damage, $7.8 million; medical, transportation (of prisoners and staff), supplies, and other administrative expenses, $5.1 million; and lost production and orders and damage to Unicor factories, $831,000. While nowhere near approaching the cost to prisoners, these statistics do indicate the relative importance to the BOP of its various areas of operation. [Editor's Note: In prisoner prosecutions stemming from the October uprisings, the government has claimed substantially higher amounts of property damage.]
The After Action Report: October 1995 Disturbances in all its disinformation splendor maybe obtained from PLN. It is instructive both for a glimpse of BOP internal process and not-for-general-dissemination commentary, and for the manner in which it simultaneously reinforces the BOP organizational identification and dictates the party line to its minions and hence-people.
Source: After Action Report: October 1995 Disturbances, 10 April 1996, Federal Bureau of Prisons.
[PLN obtained the report under FOIA. Anyone desiring a copy or the report should send $20 to PLN and specify what it is for.]
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More from this issue:
- The Penal System and the U.S. Labor Market, by Bruce Western
- NH Supreme Court Overturns Prisoner Voting Rights, by Ronald Young
- Habeas Hints: Statute of Limitations, by Kent Russell
- First Federal Execution Postponed, by Bill Dunne
- California Private Prison Riot, by Willie Wisely
- Crack in the Federal Scheme: The October Rebellion of 1995, by Bill Dunne
- No Administrative Exhaustion Required When AG Won't Give Hearing, by Paul Wright
- Family Wins $12.9 Million Award in Michigan Jail Death Suit, by Ronald Young
- From the Editor, by Paul Wright
- Arpaio Runs for Reelection on Backs of Prisoners, For the Third Time, by Paul Wright
More from Bill Dunne:
- South Carolina Rapes Exposed, April 15, 2001
- Build Jails, Not Schools: Ohio Prison Building Corruption, Jan. 15, 2001
- First Federal Execution Postponed, Oct. 15, 2000
- Crack in the Federal Scheme: The October Rebellion of 1995, Oct. 15, 2000
- New Plantation, Feb. 15, 1997
- Murder Incorporated, Feb. 15, 1994
- Dime Down, Jan. 15, 1994
- The Protection of the Law, March 15, 1992
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- First Circuit Announces Residual Clause of U.S.S.G. § 4B1.2(a)(2) When Applied Pre-Booker Is Unconstitutional Under Johnson, Nov. 15, 2020. U.S. Sentencing Guidelines.
- Third Circuit Announces Resentencing Under First Step Act Requires Use of § 3553(a) Factors, Nov. 15, 2020. U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, First Step Act.
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