I went back to the slums across the road from Khajuri Khas school two weeks after of the incident that killed five girls and injured 34 others.
An edited version of this appeared in the Indian Express on September 28, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, September 27, 2009
Shamsiran quietly put the green sequinned dress material that her daughter Afroz bought in the coffin. Afroz had bought it for Eid on the Sunday before she died in the stampede at a Khajuri Khas school. Then, she stood in the doorway, wailing, and bid farewell to Afroz.
from the next alley, another coffin emerged, of Aesha’s and one mother’s cries mingled with the wail of the other.
On September 11, through the numerous alleys in the cramped Shri Ram Colony, people poured out, hundreds of them, solemn and angry, crowding around the graveyard where three of the area’s girls werelaid to rest a day after they died.
More than two weeks have passed since the tragedy. Some of the anger has died, giving way to dejection and hopelessness. Tears still flow, but voices are hushed and subdued. But grief, fear and anger that the culprits are still at large and not one government official ever knocked on their doors to ask how they were coping has united the many families in the colony that now say their daughters will never go back to the school.
Parveen said her daughter sits up through the nights and cries. The road to recovery is long, the process painful.
“She says she can still hear the screams of the girls,” she said. “I will not send her to the school. She is my only daughter. What if I had lost her on the day? I’d be lost, too.”
As she spoke, the women who had gathered around her on Sunday afternoon, taking a break from their housework, said the government should set up a school in Shri Ram Colony.
“No girls from this area will ever attend the school. We wanted to educate them so they could have better lives, not be like us, but not at this cost,” Asraf Jahan said. “What is the government doing for us?
What is it doing about the incident? Only announcements. That doesn’t help.”
Sajida, a student of Class 7 at the school where the tragedy struck, breaks down often. On the day when rains had filled the school compound and they were going up the stairs, the boys came, and they were trapped. Someone pushed her, too. Sajida somehow managed to get out but she saw other girls clambering out of the narrow staircase, their kurtas torn, blood on their faces and arms and the screams and
the sights have stayed with her, she said.
“They pushed me, they pushed the other girls,” Sajida said. “I will not go back. They died there. The walls must be resounding with their cries. I hear them, too.”
In another section of the colony, Nazreen, another student, is recuperating from her injuries. For days after the tragedy, Nazreen remained in the house, and talked only about the deaths. Her classmate Aesha was among the dead.
Jakri Begum, the mother, said much remains shrouded in mystery.
Stories of harassment were not unusual and girls often said the boys stood outside the gates and teased them. But nobody knew it would come to this, she said.
“For us, our honour is the only thing we have. If it means we have to keep them home, we will. We have no other choice,” she said. “The government, if it wants to do something for us, they should build a school here and then our daughters won’t sit home.”
The school was slated to open September 15 but the reopening was deferred until September 29 because the situation was not “normal”, according to officials.
On the day the tragedy struck, no meals were cooked in the neighborhood. On Eid, families stayed inside shunning new clothes, and didn’t prepare sewai. They were in mourning, they said.
“It was a black day for us,” Jakri Begum said.
The stampede at the school had occurred at around 9 am on September 10 when students were trying to make their way up and down a narrow staircase when school officials asked them to shift classrooms. While there were conflicting reports about the reasons that led to the tragedy, ranging from rumours about a short circuit and current subsequently passing through the flooded classrooms on the ground floor, and boys misbehaving with girls, the locals say the latter led to the stampede and then the deaths.
Post mortem reports suggested there were no electrocution injuries and most girls had injuries in chest and hands, and the abdomen region.
But Zaeeda who washed the dead body of her niece Afroz as part of the ritualistic burial, said she saw the marks all over, on the arms, on the chest as if someone had bit her.
The Delhi government had announced an ex gratia of Rs.1 lakh to the families of each of the deceased and Rs.50,000 to each injured, but the families are yet to receive the money or any notification from the government. Five girls were killed and 34 other students injured in the stampede.
“It was sad. I lost two nieces – Aesha and Afroz. The chief minister says the government will give compensation but we don’t want the money. Money won’t bring them back. We want justice,” she said.
Rukhsana, Aesha’s mother, wiped her tears. Her elder daughter Nisha stood beside her, and her son Wasim sat brooding in a corner.
Nisha had been getting ready for school when the news came. She attended the same school as Aesha but that fateful day, her exam was in the second shift.
Each morning at 6 a.m., Wasim walks to the graveyard, and lights incense sticks at his sister’s grave. Sometimes, he sticks a few incense sticks in the fresh mud of the other two graves, too.
“When she got angry she sat in a corner. It still feels she is sitting there,” he said, standing near the boundary of the graveyard. “I miss her. That’s why I come to her grave every morning.”
Across the road, past the school building that’s locked, in one of the gullis, up a flight of stairs, in yet another house, another family is grieving.
Monika, a Class 11 student, died in the stampede, and now her mother Jagesh Choudhary said she is unwilling to send her youngest daughter Sonika back to school.
“What’s the point? If they couldn’t manage this time with the police station just a stone throw away, what is the guarantee such incidents won’t happen again,” she said, her voice ringing, the anger unnoticeable. “Two weeks have passed. None of the boys have been booked. No government official ever came to us. When a poor man’s
child dies, it is just another number. The poor have nothing but their anger and hurt.”
After the Deputy Commissioner of North-East Delhi T C Nakh was asked by the government to submit a magisterial report on the incident, process to terminate the principal and suspend the other three, including the two vice-principals and RP Yadav, the zonal deputy director of education as recommended by the magisterial probe has already begun.
But while the families mourn their dead, and stay away from festivities, the tragedy has been hijacked, and being made into a political issue already.
Across the school, a dharna had been organized Sunday. Gurvindar Singh, the national president of Suryavanshi Khatik Samaj, who led the dharna said they would pitch their own candidate in the municipal elections and cut into the Congress votes because a lot of voters belonged to the Khatik Samaj if the government didn’t build a memorial for the deceased girls and double the compensation amount.
The group has submitted a memo to the Chief Minister, too.
“We will boycott the elections,” Singh said.
But inside a room, Afroz’s father Mohd. Ishaq was once again looking at his daughter’s pictures before he left for the graveyard to spend a few minutes with the departed.
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