Remembering Sirajunnisa, a child shot dead by Kerala police during Ayodhya movement

In this series, we travel back to the turbulent 1990s to see what impact the Ram Janmabhoomi movement had on south India. We found that Karnataka was as enthusiastic then as it is now about militant Hindutva. But the other states in the region weren’t entirely immune to the flames of hate.

There are not many in Kerala who remember the horrors that went down in the Pudupalli Theruvu of Palakkad on December 15, 1991, but Sulaiman recalls them like it was yesterday. “How can I not?” he asks. “The image of my little niece who lay dead in my arms will never leave my mind.” Sirajunnisa, an unsuspecting 11-year-old who was playing with her cousin in the front yard of her house, was shot dead by the Kerala Police that day, allegedly after a senior police officer made a barbaric call for “Muslim dead bodies” via the police radio. In a desperate coverup, the police alleged in the FIR that the 11-year-old girl was leading a mob of 300 people to attack a Brahmin settlement nearby. It was a turbulent time for Palakkad, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s political campaign for the ‘Ram Janmabhoomi’ movement reaching a fever pitch.