“Ab doodh ka doodh aur paani ka paani ho gaya hai (the truth has finally come out),” Member of Parliament (MP) Hukum Singh said after the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) came out with its report on Kairana, a small town in Uttar Pradesh. Perhaps he’d read the headline that The Times of India had for its article on the NHRC report:

“From the beginning, I knew that my facts were correct,” Singh told Newslaundry. In June, Singh had circulated a list of 346 families who had allegedly migrated from Kairana because of communal tensions. Efforts to discredit his list “by certain sections of English media” had failed, he said, in light of the NHRC recently-released report.

If Singh read the Indian Express, which put its article on the NHRC report on the front page rather than tucking it away on Page 17 as ToI did, maybe he would have sounded less triumphant.

A few months ago, Singh, a member of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), made headlines when he claimed he had a list of Hindu families who had been forced to leave Kairana because they were threatened by the Muslim population of the small town. While some news media lapped up Singh’s claims, there were a few like NDTV’s Hindi channel and Indian Express that actually investigated this so-called exodus and found it to be a case of people migrating in search of better opportunities. Newslaundry went to Kairana a few days after Singh released his list. After talking to many locals – Hindus and Muslims – we learnt that the real concern in Kairana was caste, rather than religion. We were also told that communal tensions were creeping into Kairana ever since survivors of the 2013 riots of Muzaffarnagar started trickling into this town.

The findings of the NHRC report, which we’ve gone through, are along the same lines what was in our report – it points to a breakdown of law and order. It does not confirm the exodus theory as Singh and ToI claimed. It also doesn’t touch upon certain issues that people in Kairana raised while talking to us, which raises questions about the report’s thoroughness.   

The NHRC constituted an investigative team to look into the matter in response to a complaint filed by Supreme Court lawyer Monika Arora, which alleged that “families of a particular religion are leaving Kairana area of Western UP due to fear of criminals”. The methodology followed by NHRC was similar to that of news organisations. It selected three residential localities and “at random at least six alleged victims/displaced families/persons were chosen for verification” from Singh’s list. The NHRC also “had telephonic verification from at least four displaced families” mentioned in the list who had migrated “to distant places such as Dehradun (Uttarakhand) and Surat (Gujarat) from Kairana Town.”

The NHRC team concluded, based on the testimony of witnesses, that “many families migrated due to threats pertaining to increase in crime and deterioration of law and order situation”. It doesn’t go into details like the number of families who migrated from Kairana, the specific time frame for when these families left and the exact reasons behind their decision to do so.  

The report also blamed local police authorities of delaying registration of a First Information Report (FIR) in the case of abduction, gang rape and murder of a Hindu woman, purportedly by Muslim individuals, and of “committing irregularities in the investigation” of the same matter.

The rehabilitation of 25,000-30,000 Muslims from riot-hit Muzaffarnagar to Kairana “has permanently changed the social situation in Kairana town and has led to further deterioration of law and order situation”, the report notes. It also observed that “youths of the specific majority community (Muslims) in Kairana town pass lewd or taunting remarks against the females of the specific minority community in Kairana town” and that local businessmen had received extortion threats from local gangster Mukeem Kala. The NHRC has now directed the Chief Secretary and Director General of Police, UP to submit an action taken report based on the report’s findings and recommendations within eight weeks.

Arora is happy with the report. While congratulating the NHRC for highlighting the “plight of Hindus”, Arora attacked the UP government for denying justice to Hindus because of its “appeasement policies”. “Why is that we even had to intervene and give a complaint?” Arora asked. “The UP government has an entire police machinery and an army of bureaucrats and nobody could see the plight of Hindus,” she told Newslaundry.

Actually, the Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s UP government did look into the Singh’s claims almost immediately after the MP made them. A probe team was formed, which submitted its report within the month of June. Focussed on Singh’s list of 346 people who have migrated, this report concluded that 67 people of Singh’s exodus had left Kairana 10 years ago. Another 179 featuring in the list had left Kairana in the last four to five years. The report said that five families left Kairana due to government jobs, while three were forced to migrate due to extortion demands. Importantly, the list also featured at least 16 dead and seven duplicate names, as well as 27 families that were still living in Kairana. Singh’s list of fleeing families was not the best example of statistical data gathering and the UP government probe flagged these glaring loopholes.   

While reporting from Kairana, Newslaundry also found inconsistencies in Singh’s list. We met families such as Alok and Arvind Saxena, who are on the list as doctors in Kayasthwad and among those who supposedly left Kairana because of communal tensions. While Arvind isn’t even a doctor, his brother Alok still operates his clinic in the town, though he stays in Shamli now. Doctor Anshul in Teachers Colony in Kairana, who also left Kairana according to the list, is someone locals had not even heard of. Jai Singh Rathod, a resident of Kairana, said three of his nephews – Rampal, Subhash and Rajkumar – had left due to atrocities of people from “a particular religion”. However, in a video interview with Newslaundry, Rathod accepted that they left the town fearing police action in a murder case in which one of his nephews – Rampal – was named.

Locals did complain to us about how Kairana was allegedly “changing” because of the influx of Muslim victims of the Muzaffarnagar riots. They also expressed anxieties about crimes like extortion being rampant and of the power wielded by certain anti-social elements. Among the contributing reasons that locals mentioned as reasons to leave Kairana, which the NHRC omits, were better opportunities of business, education and health in the nearby township of Panipat. We were told again and again that not only Hindu, but even Muslim families have left Kairana due to the above reasons. The impression that only Hindus are impacted by the law and order situation is also inaccurate. Criminals continue to trouble both communities, like in the case of Arif and Mohsin, who run a hardware shop and were threatened by gangster Shahzad Kala, demanding extortion in July.

These exclusions cast doubts on the comprehensiveness of the NHRC report. That said, it should be noted that while the report talks of law and order problems, it does not state communal tension as a cause of either the crimes it discusses or the migrations.

Not that this has stopped Singh from using the NHRC report as validation. On Thursday, Singh and several other BJP MPs met the Meerut Zone Inspector General on Thursday demanding action to be taken in the matter.

Under these circumstances, NHRC’s neutrality is critically important because that is what gives its report credibility – that it is a record of on-ground reality, without serving any person or party’s interest. This is also why it’s lamentable that NHRC’s report on Kairana isn’t more in-depth. Because the uneasy truth is that – possibly because of the intense media coverage in June – Kairana has become something of a hot potato. When Newslaundry called Superintendant of Police (Shamli) Vijay Bhushan, he actually hung up the moment we said the word “Kairana”.

While SP and the bureaucracy of UP will say the government’s probe team submitted a more thorough report than NHRC’s, the fact is that the political rivalries in the state (which goes to election next year) will not allow the state government’s report to be seen as neutral. After all, how believable is it that a bureaucracy that reports to ministers belonging to SP will submit a report that gives credibility to claims made by someone who is SP’s political rival?