NEW DELHE: For Thakeri Kaur, justice means “blood for blood,” and the men who killed her husband and raped her sisters must be hanged if Sikhs are ever to live in peace in India,
Her shrill cry for vengeance echoed through the Tilak Vihar settlement on the outskirts of this sprawling capital where nearly a thousand Sikh widows, nurturing their hatred for Hindus with dedicated mourning, have waited five years for the day of reckoning.
The cry has been taken up across India by 16 million Sikhs whose vote helped to oust Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress Party last month and who now want justice and retribution from the new coalition government.
The haphazard alliance of opposition parties now finds itself expected to resolve religious and racial grievances accumulated under 40 years of dynastic Gandhi dominance.
The Sikh lament is nothing new in strife-torn India. Since its founding nearly 500 years ago, Sikhism has been the focus of a continuing cycle of repression, fanatical revenge and equally fanatical counter-repression.
Sikhs constitute only 2 percent of the population of India. The overwhelming majority of the population; 83 percent, are Hindus, many of whom consider the Sikhs heretics.
Punjab state, the Sikh homeland, elected among its 10 representatives to the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) the father and the widow of Beant Singh, the assassin of Indira Gandhi, who was Rajiv’s mother and prime minister when she was killed.
Sikh extremists, fighting for a separate state, have ordered their 10 new members of boycott the Lok Sabha unless the new government apologizes for the assault and destruction of the sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar under Indira Gandhi’s government in 1984.
The operation, which Sikhs consider a sacrilege, led to her assassination by her Sikh bodyguards Oct, 31, 1984.
None of the widows will ever forgive or forget the four days and nights that followed, when mobs, enraged by the assassination, enraged by the assassination, ran amok in New Delhi, murdering men wearing turbans and beards, as Sikh men do.
A Sikh casualty list claims 3,826 men and boys were massacred.
“Rajiv Gandhi killed our men, and he must be hanged just like his mother’s assassin was hanged,” cried Thakeri Kaur, 42. The other widows nodded.
Tears flowed as each widow vividly recalled the horrors of those four days.
“As the mob beat my brother, he begged me for water,” sobbed Gurdeep Kaur, 45. “Don’t give him water,” one of the men said, “we’ll give him a drink.” And he laughed.
“The men poured kerosene down my brother’s throat and put a match to it. I can still hear his screams as he died.
Her brother, husband and two sons were murdered in the rampage.
The Sikhs say that in five years no one has been convicted of the murders in New Delhi.
“Even if we took witnesses to the courts and provided names and. facts, the cases were always dismissed,” said Attar Singh, 72, lobbyist for the Sikh Forum, which demands justice for the widows.
Government officials disagree. They say six people were sentenced to life for the killings. But some admit this was a token Sikh eyewitnesses accused 2,400 people in 225 cases of violent rioting.
“There is no doubt the new government must put some people on trial over the 1984 pogrom in New Delhi if it does not want to alienate the Sikhs,” said Inder Malhotra, an independent author and commentator.
Attar Singh, who carries the label “freedom fighter” on his business card, said Sikhs have already drawn up a hit list.
On top of the list is Rajiv Gandhi, followed by Buta Singh, his former home minister, and Harkishan Lal Bhagat, the information minister who is constantly surrounded by a special unit of Uzi-toting security men known as “the black cats” because of the jumpsuits they wear.
Just before the elections, Gandhi hastily pardoned a number of jailed Sikh extremists accused of plotting to assassinate Hindu leaders. But the gesture backfired because it convinced Sikhs the accused men had been jailed on trumped-up charges,
In an obvious allusion to the assassination plot, the new Prime Minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, promised that Gandhi and his family would be protected with the same security cordon he enjoyed as prime minister. And on Thursday, in a gesture of reconciliation, the prime minister visited the Golden Temple and promised to heal the “heavy bleeding heart of Punjab state.”
Hatred is fanned each day in Tilak Vihar, the tenement blocks in which the government housed the Sikh windows and their children after keeping them in refugee camps for four months,
Most of the widows came from Block 32 in the suburb of Trilokpur, where every Sikh male was massacred and nearly every Sikh home was touched by the mobs.
The pogrom left 2,027 widows in the New Delhi area alone.
Wives begged for their husbands’ lives in vain, offered their savings for a son, cut of their men’s beards and sought refuge in police stations that did not protect them.
The persecution stopped only after the army took over.
Eventually each widow received 20,000 rupees (about 1,400) in compensation, free accommodation at Tilak Vihar and an $80a-month job in some government enterprise.
“Some of us had to go out in the streets and beg. It is so shameful to do that,” Gurdeep Kaur said.
“We say, kill one of Rajiv’s children and then give him 20,000 rupees and see if he is satisfied. Do we not have the right to want justice?” Thakeri Kaur asked.
The widows, gathered in dilapidated rooms where the garlanded photos of their murdered men hung on cracked walls, yelled their assent.
“We want the murderers behind bars,” Attar Singh said, “Only then will the Sikh regain their honor.”
Article extracted from this publication >> January 12, 1990
