A killer can kill again. But, can the dead die again?
In Nellie, they can. In fact, they have died many times over since that fateful late winter day 40 years ago.
On February 18, 1983, a huge mob of Tiwa, Koch, caste Hindu Assamese and members of other local communities brutally slaughtered more than 2,000 Bengal-origin Muslims in and around Nellie, a town in the central Assam district of Morigaon (back then, Nagaon district).
If one has to go by the total number of people killed in any anti-minority pogrom in post-independence India, the Nellie carnage sits somewhere at the top. The Gujarat pogrom of 2002 and the Bombay riots that followed the Babri Masjid demolition by Kar Sevaks in 1992 come close. And if unofficial accounts are to be believed, more than 7,000 were butchered in Nellie, which marks it out as the deadliest anti-minority pogrom in modern India.
What makes Nellie particularly unique was that unlike in other similar cases, not a single individual faced justice for the exceptional act of mass murder. The official inquiry report of the Tiwari Commission remains classified till today. There is not one memorial anywhere in India that commemorates the massacre. In that sense, the violence of Nellie
— source thewire.in | Angshuman Choudhury | 23/Feb/2023
