By: Ganesh Saili
‘Ganesh, you must write the Uttarakhand story!’ said author Alan Seally, adding: ‘And do it before someone else does.’ We had happened to meet by chance over lunch at Wildflower Hall.
How I wish I had listened to that author’s author!
‘Historians do what God can’t!’ my friend Professor Sudhakar Misra tells me. ‘They can rewrite history!’
I wish they could, Misraji. But who can rewrite the enigma of the movement for a hill state where some incidents stand out like a bookmark?
I remember this one started when Jasvir Singh Attri, the gentle Station House Officer of Police, Mussoorie pleaded with us: ‘Go home all of you!’ We were hanging around the mouth of the Tehri road, under a cloud of rumours that a horde of Uttarakhand activists was heading our way to ‘break the curfew.’
Pic Courtesy: Tulika Singh Roy
Twenty-five years afterwards, the mystery remains: Who called for the Mussoorie-kooch, just thirteen days after the Mussoorie Massacre?
Unfortunately, defeat is an orphan that no one ever claims. The plan was simple: storm the town, and break the curfew. In retrospect, it is obvious no one had thought it through. The hot-heads boarded buses, trucks, cars or anything they could get into and set off heading to one of the three approaches to the hill station. At two of the three entry points, there was no problem. Columns that headed from Dehradun were stopped at the police barrier at Kothal Gate; those coming from Barkot, Nainbagh and Purola were blocked at the Kempty barrier. The third column – the one that barreled down Tehri Road – triggered the alarm in the district headquarters of Dehradun. Hundreds of protestors from Kumaon, Pauri, Tehri and Uttarkashi smashed through makeshift police barricades along the road to Chamba. At Dhanolti they repeated the performance by breaking those barricades too, and a turbo-charged crowd hurtled down the road, with more resolve than planning – more anger than control – and got to within four kilometres – striking distance – of their target: Mussoorie.
Pic courtesy: Author
Dusk fell even as the crowds approached the municipal barrier. In desperation the Provincial Armed Constabulary let them squeeze through the old toll. The trap yawned just past the gates of Woodstock. It was the perfect place for an ambush: on one side reared the sheer rock face of Taffton and across the road was the plunge into the Palisades’ ravine. And there was no escape.
Weeks later you could still see the signs of the stark brutality of the attack: trucks and buses with their windscreens and headlights smashed by the lathi charge. Taken completely by surprise, the statehood agitators had nowhere to run. The horror of that night still gives me goose pimples. It continues to haunt me, never to be forgotten.
To escape the fury, the young and the old alike clambered up the hillside seeking refuge at any door. The doors of homes that dotted the hillside were thrown open to strangers. Quite a few found refuge within the school compound from the marauding Provincial Armed Constabulary, even as the men in khaki hunted down those who were trying to run away. Bursting into the local hospitals, they attacked the wounded, prying them loose from their beds, herding them into vans and whisking them to parts unknown. As night descended upon us an eerie silence enveloped Mussoorie, broken only by the wail of sirens that punctuated the dark stillness/ Curfew was reimposed.
As I write, in the rain-washed gully behind the Palisades, many years after the tragedy, traces of that dark day continue to bubble to the surface: the odd slipper, a lost shoe, a child’s whistle or a raggedy shawl. Occasionally, they rise to the surface, reminding us of the utter evil men can do.
Why do I revisit this time and again? I do so because, like it or not, this is our history. We either learn from it or are doomed to repeat it, making the same choices, and choosing the same paths that led to violence.
Ultimately, the ordinary man on the street pays the price for the evil that other men do.
Ganesh Saili born and home-grown in the hills belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of two dozen books; some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition worldwide.
