Courtesy: Council of Khalistan
Amitav Ghosh, a novelist from India, had a piece in a recent issue of 77le New Yorker titled “The Ghosts or Mrs. Gandhi.”
He had witnessed the pogroms against Sikhs in India’s capital city in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination on Oct. 31, 1984, and now, more than 10 years later, vividly describes what he saw done to innocent people in New Delhi.
Ghosh revives for me the trauma of helplessly watching on TV night after night the atrocities against my coreligionists.
Ghosh remembers how. “Protected by certain politicians, organizers’ were zooming around in the city, assembling ‘mobs’ and transporting them to Sikh owned houses and shops.”
Interspersed with graphic accounts of the sad goings-on in a land that professes to follow the teachings of Buddhu and Mahatma Gandhi. Ghosh himself a Hindu-summaries the grim numbers: “Over the next few days, some 2,500 people died in Delhi alone. Thousands more died in other cities. The total death toll will never be known. The dead were overwhelmingly Sikh men. En. tire neighborhoods were gulled: Tens of thousands of people were left homeless.”
Later, he bemoans that to this day. no insulator of the riots has been charged.”
One wonders why. I believe Ghosh also has the answer, but is not aware that he does. I found it close to the end of his article: “… until now I have never really written about what I saw in November of 1984.1 am not alone: Several other writers who were also witnesses) went on to publish books, yet nobody, so far as I know, has ever written about it except in passing.”
Ghosh struggles through mental gymnastics in justifying why he did not write about the events for more than 10 years, but never makes the connection between the silence of those like him and the fact that no one was brought to justice. He belatedly describes individual acts of compassion and bravery that he witnessed as well, but fails to note that in the intervening decade, violence in India has escalated.
Did he expect politicians to safeguard morality, ethics and basic human decency while artists and writers remained quiet as they nursed their personal wounds in their respective garrets?
Poets, novelists, singers, painters artists of every kind are the guardians and nurturers of a nation’s soul. If they remain silent, me nation inevitably will be hijacked by those who inherently lack vision and are guided only by the lure of immediate gains. India’s bankruptcy is not unlike what we are suffering in Canada today. Do we really expect our current crop of shortsighted and narrow-minded politicians to inspire us to the noble and lofty actions that are necessary ingredients to keep a nation united? After Pierre Trudeau’s departure, the last vestiges of the dream that the 20th century belonged to Canada have been frittered away. Do we really believe mat the current lot even has the capacity to provide the poetry that will make the next century ours?
I fear that as long as our Atwoods, Bortons, Ondaatjes, Light foots, Danbys, Batemans Mowats stay away from the thick of the current national issues, Canada will continue to slide into disintegration and absorption by
alien interests.
In this time of crisis, we need more than their art to fire the furnace of this country. What is the vision of our dreamers? We just can’t leave this nation’s fate in the hands of those who read the needs of people in percentage points.
Article extracted from this publication >> August 18, 1995
