Moradabad Eid Massacre: Forty Years of Silence

September 21, 2026
Staff Writer
Article, Save India

By Abdul Malik Mujahid

Most people outside India have never heard of what happened on an Eid day in Moradabad on August 13, 1980 . Inside India, many Muslim families have never been allowed to forget it.

That morning, close to fifty thousand Muslims gathered at the Eidgah , the open field where the whole city comes together for Eid prayers, to celebrate Eid al-Fitr. Ramadan had just ended. Children wore new clothes. Families walked to the field together, the way they had every year.

Minutes after the prayer ended, police and the Provincial Armed Constabulary opened fire on the crowd . The field had only one way in and one way out. People running from the bullets ran into each other, and many died in the crush.

No government has ever told the country exactly how many people died that day, or in the months of violence that followed across the district. Official records only admit to about 400 deaths , the number for which the government eventually paid compensation. Two scholars who visited Moradabad that winter, Satish Saberwal and Mushirul Hasan, later wrote that a careful count kept by a Muslim community group put the toll closer to 2,500, and that other observers estimated 1,500 to 2,000 . That gap has never been closed. The violence spread beyond Moradabad, to Sambhal , Aligarh, Bareilly, and Allahabad, and did not fully end until early 1981 .

A report written in 1983, hidden until 2023

The Congress state government in power at the time asked a retired judge of the Allahabad High Court, Justice M. P. Saxena, to find out what happened. He worked alone for three years and handed his 496-page report to the state government on November 29, 1983.

Then the report disappeared into a drawer. Uttar Pradesh had at least fifteen different chief ministers, from several political parties, in the forty years that followed . Not one of them made the report public. Families who lost husbands, sons, and fathers at the Eidgah grew old, and in many cases died themselves, without ever learning what the government’s own inquiry had found. The report finally reached the Uttar Pradesh assembly on August 8, 2023, tabled by the government of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath .

What the report says

When it finally became public, the Saxena report told a story that few survivors recognized. It cleared the police entirely, saying they had fired only in self-defense . It said no Hindu resident, no government employee, and no member of the RSS bore any blame for what happened at the Eidgah. The report also said many of the deaths in nearby neighborhoods came from a stampede rather than gunfire , so police could not be held responsible for those either.

Then the report turned to assign blame. It named two Muslim League leaders, Dr. Shamim Ahmed Khan and Dr. Hamid Hussain, and said the violence grew out of a “leadership tussle” between their followers, and that local leaders had begun treating the growing Muslim population as a “vote bank” for electoral purposes, and that this political rivalry, not any failure by the state, was the true cause of the killings.

Read plainly, the government’s one-man commission concluded that Muslims were responsible for their own massacre and that police had nothing to do with it.

Survivors and independent observers have never accepted that account. The journalist M. J. Akbar, who later became a member of parliament for the BJP, wrote in his book Riot after Riot that the killings amounted to “a calculated cold-blooded massacre of Muslims by a rabidly communal police force” that tried to pass off its own violence as an ordinary riot. The Muslim parliamentarian Syed Shahabuddin compared the firing to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 , when British troops fired on unarmed civilians in Amritsar. More than four decades later, residents of Moradabad still describe Eid as a day that carries grief along with celebration .

Why the silence matters

A government report is supposed to be a record the public can trust, an honest account of what officials did and why. When that record sits in a drawer for forty years and is then released with a story that shifts the blame onto the Muslim community that was fired upon and killed on their day of Eid celebration, such reports become something closer to the last word in a cover-up.

No police officer is known to have faced charges over the firing at the Eidgah . No inquiry into the missing was ever completed . The families of Moradabad waited four decades for the truth. What they received instead was a verdict, written in their own community’s name, blaming their own leaders for their own dead.

That is worth remembering, not only for what it says about one massacre in 1980, but for what it says about how long a state can delay justice, and what it can choose to say when it finally speaks.

Sources:

Wikipedia — 1980 Moradabad riots

ThePrint — 1980 Moradabad riots ‘conspiracy’ by 2 Muslim leaders

Scroll.in — Judicial inquiry report clearing RSS, BJP tabled in UP Assembly

Mainstream Weekly — On 1980 Moradabad Riots (Arup Kumar Sen, citing Saberwal & Hasan)

OpIndia — After 43 years, Yogi govt tables Moradabad riots inquiry report

India TV — 1980 Moradabad riots: judicial commission report explained

Maktoob Media — 1980 Moradabad anti-Muslim riots judicial commission report

The Quint — In this Uttar Pradesh town, Eid is a ‘black day’ for many Muslims

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