On this day, October 31, in 1984, the anti-Sikh riots began, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her bodyguards.
“It is one thing when communities attack each other but when the state is complicit in attacking one community and makes them into targets of violence, the wounds and alienation inflicted by that violence remain deeply entrenched in the community’s consciousness.”
For historian Uma Chakravarthi, this was “true for the Sikhs in 1984 and will be true for religious minorities in today’s political climate.”
This is the 39-year anniversary of the brutal violence to which Sikh people were subjected in the aftermath of the killing of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The horrors of that time lives with the survivors and their descendants even today.
Kishwar Desai, curator of Delhi and Amritsar Partition Museum says that memory is significant. “There are certain events like the Partition that remain etched in the memory of people, it lives with them and it seems like it has become a part of their DNA.” Similar is the consequence of what happened in 1984, feels Desai.
Also read: Why is the Anniversary of the 1984 Massacre of Sikhs Not a Time of Remembrance For Us All?
Puppy Kaur was 15 years old in November, 1984. Now a resident of Tilak Nagar, she remembers a different Delhi than the ones she has lived in since and before the violence.
“Delhi is a murderer,” she says. Puppy is now 55 years old. She lost 10 of her family members in the riots, she says. The chants of ‘kill the Sikhs, kill their children’ are vivid in her mind.
Puppy Kaur’s oldest brother, killed in the pogrom.
“We lived in Trilokpuri beyond the Yamuna River in Block 32. I saw kerosene poured on my father, my older brother and three of my uncles. Tyres were put around some of their necks. They were set alight,” Kaur says.
She says she saw Congress politicians and their influential supporters like Amitabh Bachchan in new light.
“He used to be my favourite before he said that ‘khoon ka badla khoon (blood for blood)’ line.
She shuts her eyes and continues, “We had to walk over dead bodies huddled together, with their skin melting under our feet”.
“Were we any less Indian? What was our fault?”
As is well known by now, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination on this day in 1984 by two of her Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, led to a pogrom upon the Sikh community, especially in north India. This assassination came in the aftermath of the storming of the Harmandir Sahib better known as the Golden Temple by the Indian Army on the orders of the Indira Gandhi-led government. Armed mobs stormed neighbourhoods with combustible material, knives, iron rods and clubs. Killings and destruction followed on a significant scale.
The writer Amitav Ghosh wrote in his 1995 account, ‘The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi’, “Terror and fire had become the motifs of the three days”.
Rajiv Gandhi, who managed office after his mother’s demise, said on November 19,1984, “When a large tree falls, the earth will shake a little”.
The line prompted senior advocate H.S. Phoolka to write a book titled When a Tree Shook Delhi. Phoolka says, “This statement was a way the government wanted to cover up the matter. It was a sign to the law enforcement agencies, state administration and police to not act and for everyone to justify the pogrom.”
Also Read: India’s Justice System Has Failed Victims of the 1984 Anti-Sikh Massacre
Nirpreet Kaur who witnessed her father being burnt alive, says she was 16 then.
“Indira Gandhi was represented as Mother India or Bharat Mata, but her death dispossessed mothers of their sons and her son stood there justifying it,” Nirpreet says.
“We were the first in the area to be targeted and they poured kerosene on my father twice and threw a matchstick from a distance and I saw him burning in front of my eyes,” she says.
Nirpreet Kaur’s family. Photo: By arrangement.
Kaur, a witness in the case against Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, was shifted to Mohali from Delhi by the CBI and also charged with the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) in 1986. She was arrested in 1988 and was finally acquitted in 1996. Sajjan Kumar was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Delhi high court in 2018. The court said the sentencing could not have happened without the perseverance and courage of Nirpreet Kaur, among two others.
Over forty years since the carnage, various commissions and committees have been established to look into the role of the administration, rehabilitation of those affected and the cases themselves. The commissions have either been established to follow up on the progress of the previous recommendations or to take care of unfulfilled promises. Phoolka says, “There remains high inconsistency between the recommendations of the commissions, what was implemented and the trials conducted. The sole reason behind this was the unwillingness of the government to act with an intention.”
The Marwah Commission under then-additional commissioner of police Ved Prakash Marwah was appointed to investigate the role of the police in the carnage. It was in the middle of 1985 that the home ministry instructed the Commission to stop all proceedings when it was on the final leg. All their records were taken over and transferred to the Misra Commission. In an interview to The Hindu, Marwah spoke about the shameful role of the police in instrumentalising the violence. He discussed how there were instances when he saw the police officers not even visiting the spots from where the incidents were reported.
Phoolka also spoke about how multiple cases were diluted to single frivolously reported cases in which the other details of damage went unreported.
“There is no way that we as a community will ever be able to forget what was done to us in the three days of 1984. The memory will die only when we die,” says Puppy Kaur.
“What we as a nation should derive of it, is a lesson to not rule with division and violence,” she adds.