Behind bars, beyond gallows lie the unmarked graves of Tihar

Officials said Mohammad Afzal Guru and Mohammad Maqbool Bhatt — executed in 2013 and 1989, respectively — were among at least four people whose last rites were performed inside the Tihar complex

Behind Tihar’s high walls, lie the graves of Parliament attack convict Mohammad Afzal Guru and Kashmiri separatist leader Mohammad Maqbool Bhatt with no tombstones or markings of any kind to denote their final resting place. Their presence is barely noticed amid the daily grind of prison life, said jail officials on Thursday, a day after the Delhi High Court dismissed a plea seeking the removal of the graves from the prison premises.

the jail manual prohibits the construction of any tombstone or memorial within the premises, said jail officials. (HT Archive)

Officials said Guru and Bhatt — executed in 2013 and 1989, respectively — were among at least four people whose last rites were performed inside the Tihar complex. The others include Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh, convicted for the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The site where Guru and Bhatt were interred lies in Jail Number 3, on plain ground near the “phansi kothi (gallows)”, without any stone or marker to indicate how their lives and deaths, decades apart, had shaken a nation.

A prison official said the area is traversed daily by inmates and staff. “People often walk over the place where they were laid to rest. If an inmate is unaware of the graves, then there’s no way of knowing,” the official said.

Recalling the execution of Satwant and Kehar Singh in 1989, Gupta said the State had decided they would be cremated inside Tihar. “There was a catch though — under municipal rules, a cremation can take place only at a designated ground. The prison was therefore officially declared a cremation site before the two were executed. Their mortal remains were collected by officials but not handed over to their families,” he said. The site was later converted into the present Jail Number 6.

Prison officials said that ordinarily, no dedicated space is reserved for burials or cremations inside Tihar as bodies are in most cases handed over to families. In recent executions, such as the hanging of four men convicted in the 2012 Delhi gangrape case in 2020, the bodies were handed over to their families.

The matter of these graves at Tihar reached the Delhi High Court after a petition was filed by the Vishwa Vedic Sanatan Sangh and Jitendra Singh, which sought the removal of Guru’s and Bhatt’s graves, claiming that their presence inside a state-controlled prison was “illegal, unconstitutional, and against public interest”.

The plea argued that the site had become a location of “radical pilgrimage”, attracting extremist sympathisers who venerate the convicted terrorists.

On Wednesday, the court dismissed the petition, holding that the decision to bury the two within Tihar was a sensitive call made by the government at the time of their execution and could not be revisited after decades.

“But removing a grave which has existed for the last 12 years... The government decided this at the time of execution, keeping in view the fallout of handing over the body to the family or burial outside the jail. These are very sensitive issues, with many factors considered. Can we now challenge that decision after 12 years?” the court remarked.