When Terror Stalked Trilokpuri

Rahul Bedi And Joseph Maliakan, Indian Express. August 09, 2005

Reporters came across an orgy of violence that led to 350 deaths in East Delhi while police said nobody was killed.

New Delhi, November 2 1984

The police entered Block 32 in Trilokpuri across the Jamuna in East Delhi late on Friday evening to evacuate the numb and stupefied survivors of a grisly massacre, an unchecked orgy of violence and arson in the preceding 30 hours.

Around 350 are feared dead, women and children included.

Over 40 miscreants were arrested, including local Station House Officer Surveer Singh and two other policemen, who have been charged with criminal negligence of duty.

The charred and hacked remains of the dead eloquently depicted a horrible and heart-rending story. One relieving feature was the fact that over 600 Sikh women and children emerged out of Hindu homes where they had been given shelter. Practically all of them had survived the seemingly unending ordeal, without food or even water. The carnage took place within an area of 500 or 600 sq yards.

Women, children and a handful of wounded Sikhs, hiding under dead bodies since Thursday night, were rescued by reporters around 6.30 pm on Friday 6. They were emotionless. They had no tears left to shed.

A three-year-old girl, stepping over the bodies of her father, three brothers and countless others lying in the street, clung helplessly to a reporter, pleading for help. ‘‘Please take me home,’’ she said.

Only a three-man police force arrived in this secluded colony around 6 pm, despite information of the carnage being repeatedly conveyed to authorities. It could do little to dispel the palpable menace in the air.

‘‘Nobody has been killed in Trilokpuri,’’ said a police motorcycle patrol officer on Friday afternoon when we, the first outsiders to visit the area, were roughed up while asking for directions to reach Block 32. Our car was stoned and a 1,000-strong mob told us to leave immediately.

An Army patrol, under Colonel P P S Bains, in adjoining Shakarpur, the only one we saw the entire afternoon in East Delhi, promised to send soldiers around 3 pm on Friday. They had not arrived till 5.50 pm. A stray Army patrol skirted the area around 6 pm.

Nikhil Kumar Singh, Additional Commissioner of Police, manning the ‘‘control room’’ in the Police Commissioner’s Office flashed information of the carnage at 5 pm. The police arrived an hour later.

But then, of course, it was much too late—30 hours too late.

‘‘All our men have been butchered and our homes pillaged,’’ said Indira. ‘‘Take me away,’’ she wailed. Her three teenage daughters, Kamla, Vidya and Neena, are missing. There was no hope of escape for these people. All exit points had been sealed by huge water pipes.

One woman, a polio victim with a two-month-old baby, begged reporters to guard her and her house after she was told that she would be evacuated. She had just bought a television and new clothes for her baby on Thursday.

A Sikh youth, his slashed stomach patched up with a turban, crawled out from under the dead bodies and collapsed in the arms of the reporters.

Officers at the police headquarters were unwilling to believe reports of the Trilokpuri massacre. Hukum Chand Jatav, Additional Commissioner of Police, said he had toured the area on Friday evening and found nothing amiss. ‘‘There have been stray cases of violence,’’ he admitted.

Nikhil Kumar Singh and K C Johri, chairman of the Delhi State Industrial Development Corporation (DSIDC), manning telephones, said they were merely ‘‘guest artists’’ performing the job of a post office, passing on messages to the main police control room, three floors above.