NEW DELHI: On the morning of 18 February 1983, Nellie woke up like any other village in Assam’s winter. Cattle grazed across paddy fields, women set rice to boil, and children chased hens between bamboo huts. A few hours later, those fields were littered with bodies, many of them infants carried on their mothers’ backs, and entire villages burned to the ground.
Within six hours, more than 2,000 people, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims, were massacred, making Nellie one of independent India’s deadliest episodes of targeted mass killing. Locals, however, say that around 10,000 people had lost their lives, as many remain untraced. Although the numbers may seem exaggerated, there was never an effort to properly document the dead and untraced.
No official judicial report was made public. No convictions followed. Hundreds of First Information Reports (FIRs) were registered, but not a single case reached final trial. After the Assam Accord of 1985, most cases were quietly withdrawn, and the accused walked free, without a verdict or accountability. The archive remained sealed, the dead unnamed, the state silent.
Now, two documents finally speak. The T.P. Tewary Committee Report, commissioned by the Assam government after the massacre, and the Mehta Judicial Commission Report, established independently when no official judicial probe was ordered, have surfaced after nearly four decades.
Read together, they reconstruct in granular detail how Nellie happened, how warnings were ignored, how elections were pushed through despite boycott, and how the state allowed cases to collapse after 1985.
When national outrage followed the massacre, no judicial inquiry was ordered by the state or by New Delhi. Instead, a civil servant–led fact-finding exercise under T.P. Tewary was set up, but its findings never entered the public domain until this year.
In response to this institutional vacuum, the Assam Rajyik Freedom Fighters’ Association constituted a Non-Official Judicial Inquiry Commission, chaired by Justice T.U. Mehta, former Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh High Court. He was joined by G.C. Phukan (Retd. IAS) and academic Professor Raihan Shah, forming a panel with no state funding, no police support, and no archival cooperation, yet tasked with documenting one of the most violent chapters in Assam’s history.
The Mehta Commission nevertheless travelled through the state, visiting burned villages, relief camps, paddy grave sites, and police outposts. It recorded more than 600 oral testimonies and over 6,000 memoranda, many of them documenting the last words, locations of bodies, names of missing family members, sightings of attackers, police failures, and political utterances made in the days leading up to 18 February.
Before the Killings
One theme appears repeatedly in witness statements: Nellie was not a war zone until the elections. Villagers told the Commission that Assamese and Bengali speaking Muslims lived side-by-side, cultivating the same riverbanks, observing each other’s festivals, trading fish, cattle, and jute without hostility.
The rupture began only when the 1983 state elections were announced despite a large-scale boycott call under the Assam Movement, which demanded that alleged illegal immigrants be removed from the electoral rolls. The boycott turned polling booths into flashpoints.
Witness No. 523 Nurul Islam, a student from Nellie, told the panel that before the incident, “there was full amity and peace between the two communities, and the election was the main reason for the incident.”
Testimonies from Abdul Gafoor and Md. Abdul Mutaik, also recorded in the Mehta Report, corroborated this position, stating that tension reached its highest point only when polling was enforced.
The report also documents earlier incidents on 13 and 15 February 1983, when Muslim and Assamese settlements were attacked and counter-attacked, houses looted and burnt, cattle driven away, and women and children shifted to camps in Mikirbheta out of fear. Yet, no security build-up followed.
Using witness testimony and ground inspection, the Mehta Commission reconstructs the morning of the massacre. At dawn, large armed mobs surrounded Muslim-majority villages — Basundhari, Bhogduba, Silbheta, Matir Parbat, Borjola, Bhogdubi Habi, Mukoni and Rupohi — approximately 5 to 8 km from Nellie town, under Jagiroad Police Station but bordering Lalung tribal areas.
Attackers came with spears, daos, firearms, kerosene containers, and bamboo stakes. Houses were set on fire first, forcing families to flee into the open, where they were hacked and shot. Infants were thrown into ponds, women were cut down while carrying children, and bodies were piled across waterlogged rice fields. Several witnesses described attackers blocking escape routes on all sides, ensuring no survival corridor remained.
The Commission visited one site where a mass grave of 585 people was documented. Photographs were taken, village registers checked, and surviving relatives asked to identify clothing, bangles, and teeth. Many could not. Several graves held entire families whose names have never been written into any official ledger.
The report is explicit: security deployment on the day was absent where it was needed most.
Reinforcements were requested but not sent. Police firing occurred elsewhere in Assam during elections — sometimes excessive, even during funerals and student gatherings — but Nellie, the epicenter of mass killing, saw no protective intervention strong enough to prevent slaughter.
Individual Survivors
Among those who testified was Rehana Khatun, then a 13-year-old girl who survived by hiding for hours beneath bodies in a paddy ditch. When she emerged, she found her mother beside her, lifeless, one arm severed, her brothers missing. She never remarried and still visits the grave mound that holds her family.
Another testimony came from Abdul Gafoor, who lost his wife, father and three daughters. He told the commission that the fire came first, followed by screams, followed by silence. He still lives in a bamboo house built near the spot where his home once stood.
There were also accounts from the Assamese side. Witness 254, Jogeswar Nath, submitted that he saw entire clusters of houses burnt, a school and mosque both destroyed, confirming that vengeance escalated beyond political grievance into indiscriminate killing.
These accounts, recorded meticulously in the Mehta Report, turned an event often described in numbers into an event of real people.
According to the Commission’s documentation and later reviews, 688 FIRs were filed, 299 charge-sheeted, and hundreds of accused identified by name, village, and affidavit. Yet after the 1985 Assam Accord, most criminal cases related to the massacre were quietly dropped.
Trials never proceeded, witnesses were never examined in court, and no convictions were delivered. Many accused continued living in the same districts, some even contesting panchayat elections and holding land. The withdrawal of cases effectively granted amnesty, leaving Nellie without legal resolution.
The Mehta Commission recommended judicial accountability, compensation for survivors, revision of electoral rolls, police reform, and mechanisms for conflict prevention in mixed-population belts. None of these recommendations resulted in structural policy changes.
Both the T.P. Tewary and Mehta Reports converge on core conclusions.
The 1983 polls never should have been conducted under boycott conditions. Intelligence warnings were ignored. The massacre was not spontaneous; it followed escalations directly connected to election enforcement. Security deployment was inadequate, selective, and in some regions excessively punitive, while in Nellie functionally absent.
Civil liberties were severely compromised during elections, detentions without warrant, night raids, beatings, censorship, and firing on crowds.
Most importantly, both reports confirm that the majority killed were women and children, not organised combatants. The killings did not emerge from generations of ethnic hostility but from a rupture triggered by electoral confrontation and aggravated by administrative failure.
Final Question
Forty years after the killings, Nellie is no longer undocumented. Both commissions have now entered the public domain, placing on record the testimonies of survivors, counts of bodies, chronology of events, failures of policing, and the fact that justice was abandoned by design.
Survivors speak not only of loss but of silence, a silence deeper than death, enforced through withdrawal of cases, disappearances of files, and the absence of any formal acknowledgment in textbooks or memorials.
The reports exist today merely as symbolic historical material rather than evidence.
They document that a massacre of more than 2,000 people occurred, which was preventable, and that the state allowed the legal process to die, and that the country moved on without trial, verdict, or remembrance.
As these findings re-enter public conversation after four decades, the question shifts from what happened in Nellie to what India is prepared to do with the truth now available.
The documents are open. The ground remains scarred. The families continue to live with names that were never written on memorial stones. The massacre remains silent and unresolved.
Have you liked the news article?