Bhagalpur 1989: The Massacre of Muslims That India Chose to Forget

How rumours, a partisan police force and decades of delay failed Bhagalpur’s Muslims, drawing on Asghar Ali Engineer’s reading of the inquiry report

In October 1989, Bhagalpur, a silk-weaving town in eastern Bihar, became the site of one of the worst massacres in independent India. Around 1,000 people were killed in two months, and roughly nine in ten of them were Muslim. Whole Muslim neighbourhoods were burnt, families were wiped out, and bodies were hidden in ponds, wells and fields.

Six years later, writing in the Economic and Political Weekly after the official inquiry report finally appeared, the scholar and reformist Asghar Ali Engineer set out what the judges had found: a violence fed by lies, carried out with the help of those meant to stop it, and followed by a long silence. Revisited today, his essay reads as an account of how a minority was left without protection, and then without justice.

The scale of it, in numbers

The commission noted that Bhagalpur had seen communal clashes before, in 1924, 1936, 1946 and 1967, but those were confined to the town and short-lived. The 1989 violence, it said, surpassed all of them. Never before had the town’s Muslims suffered on this scale.

A procession, a slogan, a spark

The trigger was a Ramshila pujan procession, one of many carrying consecrated bricks for the proposed Ram temple at Ayodhya. Engineer argues that this movement was “more politically than religiously inspired.” Across the country, he notes, these processions left communal tension or violence in their wake.

The organisers told the commission their marchers were unarmed devotees singing bhajans. Much of the testimony that undermined this account came from Hindu witnesses, who described slogans calling for the Muslim neighbourhood of Tartarpur to be emptied and processionists carrying swords, spears and lathis. Engineer notes that “many Hindu witnesses helped bring out the truth.”

The bomb that may not have been

The account that justified the violence was that bombs were thrown at the procession from a Muslim school. The commission found reasons to doubt it. The superintendent of police said the missiles caused no damage or injury. Police who entered the school found no one and nothing incriminating, and the administration had no list of anyone injured by bombs.

The timing also undercut the story. Attacks on Muslim homes and shops in Shujaganj and near Parwatti began around noon, while the alleged bombing happened around 2 pm. Engineer concludes that the theory of the school bombing as the trigger “falls flat.”

Rumour versus reality

Engineer’s subtitle refers to “rumours and cooked up stories.” Tap or click each card to see what investigators actually found.

Every one of these stories cast Muslims as the aggressors, and every one turned out to be false or unproven. Yet they travelled faster than any correction. Engineer argues that such rumours are spread deliberately to fan the fire, and that the district administration, sympathetic to the communal elements, did nothing to stop them. The inquiry later blamed the administration, the police and sections of the press for spreading false information in an already charged atmosphere.

An indictment of the state

The commission described searches of Muslim homes in Tartarpur that it compared to the conduct of occupying armies. It found no record of any Hindu being arrested on the night of the riot, even though officers had seen the looting in Shujaganj.

The role of senior officers was contested from the start. The then superintendent of police, K.S. Dwivedi, survived an order from Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who visited on 26 October 1989 and told the chief minister to transfer him. Rajiv Gandhi overruled the transfer himself after a mob of policemen and VHP supporters demanded it.

The village massacres

Some of the worst killings happened outside the city. The map shows where the main sites were; click a circle for what happened there. The chart below compares reported death tolls.

Logain was the worst case. According to the inquiry report, a mob of about 4,000 from surrounding villages attacked on the morning of 27 October, allegedly directed by an assistant sub-inspector of the Jagdishpur police station. The killing lasted nine hours. The bodies were moved from a pond to wells and finally buried in paddy fields, one of which was later planted with cauliflowers.

The commission’s account put the toll at nearly 200. The court case that followed was about 116 victims. In July 2007, 18 years later, a Bhagalpur court sentenced 14 men, including a policeman, to life imprisonment for killing 116 Muslim men, women and children. Six other accused had died by then and four were absconding. Engineer had already called the commission’s findings “no ordinary indictment of the forces of law and order.”

Justice elsewhere came even more slowly. Logain and Chanderi had strong witnesses and saw prosecutions more than a decade later, but cases from Bhatoriya, Rasalpur, Padghari, Chajghora and Silampur-Amanpur ended in bail or settlements, with accused never punished.

The survivors

Behind the numbers are families who lost everything. Mohammad Javed lost 12 members of his family in Parbatti, a mixed neighbourhood of Bhagalpur town; theirs were the bodies later found in the well that rumour had filled with Hindu students. In Chanderi, Mallika Begum survived the massacre and, at just 14, testified in the Patna High Court, becoming one of the best-known faces of Bhagalpur’s survivors. Twenty-five years later, Jalebi Khatoon’s was the only Muslim family still living in Logain.

Even the town’s most respected Muslims were not spared. The commission named a doctor who ran a clinic in Tartarpur and a Bhagalpur University academic among those beaten, humiliated and jailed by the police during the searches. As the report put it, they expected the police to protect them, only to find their protectors had become their destroyers.

About 48,000 people were driven from their homes. Many never went back, and Muslim families who once lived in mixed villages regrouped in Muslim-majority areas, a quiet redrawing of Bhagalpur’s map that outlasted the violence itself.

Timeline: from the procession to the verdict

Click any event to read what happened.

Justice denied, justice delayed

Engineer was frustrated that the first report took five years. What followed was worse. Of 864 cases filed, 535 were closed. In Chanderi, 38 people were charged and 16 convicted. Elsewhere, cases ended in bail or settlements, and in 2017 the Patna High Court acquitted Kameshwar Yadav, one of the accused.

The officers whose conduct the inquiry questioned did not pay a price. K.S. Dwivedi, the superintendent of police whose communal bias the commission described, rose through the ranks and was later appointed Bihar’s director general of police. Only in 2005 did a new state government reopen 27 cases and set up a fresh commission under Justice N.N. Singh. Its 2015 report again blamed the state government, the district administration and the police, finding that the riots could have been avoided had they acted in time.

Even compensation was unequal. Families received Rs 3.5 lakh per death from the Centre, less than the Rs 5 lakh paid to victims of the 1984 riots. When survivors went to court asking for parity, the Patna High Court and then the Supreme Court turned them away.

Engineer argued that inquiry reports matter because they are legal records of what happened and who was responsible. For Bhagalpur’s Muslims, that record was written, but it was largely ignored.

“Communal hatred and bloodshed has led us nowhere.” — Asghar Ali Engineer

He calls for strengthening secular and democratic forces, insisting that no modern nation-state can survive without them.

The lesson for today

The numbers tell the story Engineer described. About 200 rumoured student deaths turned out to be 2 probable deaths, both Muslim. The bombing said to have started the riot came two hours after Muslim homes were already burning. Around 1,000 people were killed, most of them Muslim, and their families waited 18 years for the first major convictions.

Bhagalpur has not faded entirely. In March 2025, after violence in Nagpur, some social media accounts shared pictures of cauliflower fields as a coded reference to Logain, where the murdered were buried under a cauliflower crop. A massacre that should be remembered with shame is being invoked as a threat.

That is why Engineer’s point still matters. Riots like Bhagalpur are not sudden explosions of anger. They are made possible by those who organise them, those who spread the lies that justify them, and those in uniform who look away or join in. Remembering the victims, and naming those failures, is the first defence against it happening again.

A note on figures: the Logain toll differs between sources (nearly 200 in the commission’s account, about 118 reported by Al Jazeera, 116 in the court case).

Sources

1. Asghar Ali Engineer, “Bhagalpur Riot Inquiry Commission Report,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 30, No. 28 (15 July 1995), pp. 1729–1731. JSTOR
2. “1989 Bhagalpur violence,” Wikipedia
3. “The forgotten riots of Bhagalpur,” Al Jazeera (2014)
4. “Indicted for his Role in Bhagalpur Riots, KS Dwivedi Takes Over as New Bihar DGP,” Sabrang India
5. “Life Term for 14 Killers of Muslims,” Arab News (8 July 2007)
6. “How the Bihar Police Colluded With Hindu Mobs During the 1989 Bhagalpur Massacre,” The Caravan (2017)
7. Laugain village, Goradih block, villageinfo.in (location of Logain)
8. “Bhagalpur riots probe panel report,” ummid.com (7 August 2015)
9. “SC Rejects Plea For Parity In Compensation To Riot Victims,” LiveLaw (2017)
10. “Hindutva handles share cauliflower images… evoking Bhagalpur massacre,” Maktoob Media (20 March 2025)