NO CLOSURE FOR NELLIE MASSACRE SURVIVORS FROM PROBE REPORT

ON February 18, 1983, the vilest of human instincts manifested in Assam’s Nellie village when about 2,000 Bengali-speaking Muslim settlers were slaughtered at the height of an anti-immigrant agitation.

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Many of the victims of that mass murder 42 years ago were women and children. After the dust settled, as many as 688 criminal cases were filed; 310 reached the chargesheet stage, while the rest were closed due to ‘lack of evidence’. Two years down the road, all 310 chargesheeted cases were dropped by the then Asom Gana Parishad government as part of deal to forge the Assam Accord. None of the accused ever faced trial. Adding insult to injury, successive governments sat on the reports of two commissions that probed the bloody pogrom—one official and the other commissioned by NGOs. Both those reports were finally made public this week,