Eighteen years ago, on 13 June 1997, Neelam Krishnamoorthy—a resident of Kalkaji in South Delhi—bid farewell to her daughter and son as they went to watch the Bollywood film Border at the Uphaar Cinema in Green Park. They never came back. In the month after the fire that claimed their lives and the lives of 57 others, Neelam and her husband, Shekhar, came together with the families of other victims to form the Association of the Victims of the Uphaar Tragedy (AVUT). When the group first met, on 30 June 1997, only eight or nine people attended; Neelam and her husband found them by combing through obituaries. But, after the first meeting, AVUT members worked hard to reach others, and the group gradually grew to represent the families of every victim of the fire. As the president of the AVUT, Neelam has been the public face and private stalwart of the fight to ensure that the deaths were not in vain. Surrounded by other victims’ families at the annual memorial service on 13 June 2015, she mourned a second tragedy. Neelam handed out a press release that said, in part, “despite following the case relentlessly for the last eighteen years, AVUT has failed in its endeavour.”
The facts of the Uphaar fire and its aftermath have been widelyreported: a faulty power transformer, sparks in an overfilled garage, cars on fire, thick smoke rising into the theatre, pandemonium, cut power, blocked balcony exits, and 59 people killed by asphyxiation. For years before the fire, the building was a tinderbox, brimming with licensing violations and illegal additions. On the day of the tragedy, fire trucks took too long to reach the theatre; few ambulances ever arrived. It was an event extraordinary for its toll and scale, but the product of common failures and expected inconveniences: who has not been stuck in a traffic jam in Delhi, or entered a building that didn’t seem safe?
Early on, the AVUT had decided that it would not make its goal financial compensation. Naveen Sawhney, whose daughter was killed at Uphaar, told me when I met him on 26 May at his home, “We were not fighting for money, because money cannot bring back your children.” Instead, the group sought to create a deterrent against future tragedies. It wanted to make an example of Sushil and Gopal Ansal, the wealthy brothers who owned and operated Uphaar.
Two primary cases emerged to achieve this aim. The first was a civil case, commenced by a writ petition filed by the AVUT in July 1997. The case was intended to establish liability for the deaths and provide restitution for the victims’ families. It relied in part on the scathing Kumar Committee report, issued by the Deputy Commissioner for the South Government of the National Capital Territory (NCT) on 3 July 1997. The writ petition sought to hold accountable for the tragedy, the Ansal brothers, the Delhi Vidyut Board—that was formed by the Delhi government for the generation and distribution of power to the most regions of Delhi—the licensing authority, in this case the Office of the Commissioner of Police, which should have enforced the code violations in the building, and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. The second was a criminal case, prompted by a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) charge sheet filed in November 1997 that aimed at punishing the perpetrators. Sixteen people were charged, including Sushil and Gopal Ansal, the repairmen responsible for the transformer, and the fire inspector.
Neelam had hoped that significant damages and severe enough punishments would deter business owners from treating safety concerns as superfluous to their business interests. “Unless you make a hole in their pocket, they’ll never feel the pinch of it,” she told me. If she could help to prevent another Uphaar from occurring, she explained, that would honour the memory of her children. That would be justice.
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