A Flashback To The 1984 Riots

Tavleen Singh. Indian Express. October 31, 2004

http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/full_story.php?content_id=58010

It's hard to write an article that appears on October 31 without remembering that it was on this day, twenty years ago, that Indira Gandhi was shot dead in her garden by two Sikh policemen. With the return of the Gandhis to the political limelight there will be many this year who will remember Mrs Gandhi, many who will pay fulsome tributes, many who will glorify her reign. How many will remember the pogroms that followed? Almost nobody is my guess even if we now have a Sikh Prime Minister and an uncompromisingly secular government. Not even the Communists with their daily petulance over perceived communalism will dare remind the government they control that justice still has not been done. It’s the one event that even the most ardent secularists choose to forget which is for me a constant puzzle.

In the many years I have spent reporting wars, riots, caste killings and other violent events on our sub-continent, I can remember nothing that matches the horror of those first three days after Mrs Gandhi was killed. For those of you who were not there or may have forgotten, let me help you remember. Within minutes of Mrs Gandhi being shot, my news editor rang me and asked me to rush to the hospital where she had been taken. By the time I got there they had already closed the gates of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and although there was no official announcement of her death till late that afternoon we found out within the first hour. Despite All India Radio pretending all day that she was still alive news of her death spread through the city quickly but on the first day there were no killings. There was tension, an ominous, heavy tension but nobody, and especially not ordinary Sikhs, had any idea of what was going to happen. The most that was expected were a few stray incidents of violence.

I worked at the time for a British newspaper and they wanted me to go to Amritsar the next day to gauge the mood there. By the time I returned on the afternoon of November 1, I could see the fires from the airport.

There was chaos at the airport because there were no taxis since most Delhi taxi-drivers were Sikhs and the mobs had started burning them alive. When I finally managed to get a ride with a Tamil gentleman, our taxi was surrounded on the way to the city by a mob with petrol soaked rags in their hands. ‘‘Any Sikhs in the car,’’ they grinned as the Tamil gentleman looked nervously at me. By that night armies of killers roamed the streets of Delhi looking for Sikhs to kill and Sikh properties to burn. For the next two days, the mobs were allowed to murder, loot and burn while the government sat back and watched. By the time the Army was ordered out, the streets of Delhi were littered with bodies and the burned out remains of trucks and taxis with the charred, corpses of their drivers at the wheel. Nobody bothered to pick up the dead because there was no room left in the morgues and one of the images that continues to haunt me is of a dog eating a human arm in a Delhi street.

More than 3000 Sikhs were killed in two days in the city and then in a couple of hours it was brought to a sudden halt. All it took to stop the carnage and the savagery were a handful of soldiers in the streets with orders to shoot at sight. The mobs melted away as they would have done on day one if the government had wanted them to.

Anybody who believes that what happened in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat was the worst communal violence since Partition does not remember what happened in Delhi in the first week of November 1984. It was our first State-sponsored pogrom and if we do not acknowledge this then we must recognize that attempts to bring justice to the victims of Gujarat is mere tokenism.

It is wonderful that the wheels of justice, that Modi and his murderous thugs tried to stall, are moving again. May every murderer, rapist and thug be brought to justice so that we never have another Gujarat. But when will those responsible for what happened to the Sikhs in 1984 be punished for what they did? I ask the question rhetorically because I know the answer is never, but justice of some kind must be done if we are serious about ensuring that no government in future ever gets away with pogroms against its own citizens.

Of course swift and severe justice is the best way to ensure this but swift justice is not possible from a justice system that will take 350 years to clear its backlog of cases. Besides, Prime Ministers and Chief Ministers are unlikely to be tried like ordinary criminals so the way forward, in my view, is for our shiny, new, ‘‘secular’’ government to set up something similar to South Africa’s Truth Commission. Let men like P V Narasimha Rao (Home Minister in 1984) and Narendra Modi and all the officials and policemen who failed to do their duties come before the Commission and answer for their failures. Let those who saw their husbands, brothers and sons burned alive come forward and publicly identify those who led the mobs.

Let the new ‘‘secular’’ government put its secularism where its mouth is and convert the toothless Minorities Commission into a powerful Truth Commission. It is the least we can do for the thousands of innocents who died because two Sikh policemen assassinated Mrs Gandhi.