I walked towards the Gurudwara in Taimur Nagar, half a kilometer away from where we lived. I could not believe my eyes. The beautiful edifice was engulfed in huge flames, which were quickly reducing everything to ashes. Here the mob was even bigger and was shouting communal slogans quite openly. Once again, there were men on motorcycles issuing instructions. (72 Gurudwaras were burnt in the capital during the pogrom.) Many shops belonging to Sikhs in the bazaars in Bharat Nagar and Taimur Nagar were burnt down as well. In front of the Gurudwara in Taimur Nagar, I saw two trucks apparently belonging to Sikhs, in flames.
It must have been before 11 in the morning that we tried to call the local police stations. The numbers were constantly busy. On one occasion, when I did get through to the Sriniwaspuri police station, the police officer at the other end simply denied any help, pleading that they had “other” duties to perform. In the end, I walked down the road to the Police Chowki at Bharat Nagar, only to find it locked, with not a uniformed man in sight.
We tried calling the Fire Brigade. But no one answered the phone.
Almost bang opposite our house, in C-Block, stayed at that time Ashwini Kumar, a senior retired police officer in front of whose house there was always a police van parked carrying his pehredars (security guards). My brother and I approached them and asked them to please call Mr Kumar. The first time we made the request, the gun-toting men simply looked curtly the other way. The second time, we were more insistent, upon which we were told that the Saheb was out of town. This was a lie. Our servants claimed to have seen him on his morning walk that very day. Whenever we tried calling Mr.Kumar, the line was busy. This further increased the likelihood that we were being lied to.
At one point in the afternoon we approached the aide to Mr.Kumar, only to be told that the (armed) policemen were there for his personal security and could not interfere in the affairs of the rest of the colony. In fact, a house, which was almost opposite to the house of this officer, was looted and partially burnt. The policemen stood there, watching the mob indulge in looting and burning.
Repeatedly during the day we tried to reach the police in many of the stations in South and Central Delhi. Not once did we succeed in speaking to a constable or an officer. Later we learnt that a house belonging to a Sikh family had been burnt down the road from us by a mob, even as a jeep loaded with policemen drove past.
Doordarshan TV, the only (state-run) channel in those days, was merely showing Mrs. Gandhi’s body lying in state in Teen Murti House, with people filing in and out, paying their last tribute to her. Even on TV, some members of the Youth Congress, well within earshot of the new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, were shouting “Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge!” Such seemed to have been the depth of state endorsement of the violence. If someone had relied only on TV news and coverage in those days they couldn’t possibly believe that almost 3000 innocents were murdered in 4 days, most of them in broad daylight, in India’s capital city. Not one image of the looting and arsoning, let alone of the killing, was ever shown on TV. It would have appeared that the city of 9 or 10 million people was in solemn sorrow and mourning at the death of the great departed leader.
The looting and arsoning went on till about 5 pm after which it suddenly stopped. We learnt later that curfew was going to be imposed and the army was going to be called out. At 6.30 pm we saw a tank appear in our neighborhood. Why this could not be done earlier is quite clear, in light of what later investigations by human rights groups revealed.
It was not until several days later that Doordarshan reported on the mayhem in the city. Newspapers began to tell the stories pouring in from different parts of the city. New Friends Colony had been no exception to the general pattern of organized arson and violence. Shops and houses belonging to Sikhs had been looted and burnt everywhere. More disturbing, and this came to light only after November 3, Sikhs had been murdered by the hundreds in the most brutal manner possible.
The luxury of peace
The next day, November 2, 1984, my family and I took a walk around the colony. We saw the charred remains of many houses that had been burnt down, interspersed with many houses that had not been touched at all. The pattern was obvious. The houses belonging to those who were not Sikhs had not been touched. Sikh houses had been burnt down to the point where only the bare structure-the basic masonry and flooring—remained. None of the furniture and the woodwork could be seen any more. There was still some glow in the embers in some cases. And of course, the striking smells of kerosene and ash. There were twisted and gnarled pieces of metal. Broken fans and tables lay strewn randomly in the chaos. Virtually nothing had been spared.
We attended meetings throughout the day to form peace committees and patrolling squads. There was no further violence in our part of the city, a fact surprising in itself, if the claim about the violence being a spontaneous outpouring of rage at the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi had any truth to it. The rage died down rather easily. A young man from Bharat Nagar (whose name I unfortunately don’t recall two decades later), and who turned out to be a Congress worker, told my father that we should not bother to form peace committees, that “our” property would not be touched: “if you lose even a pin, you can get it from me”, he boasted. He said that “they” had planned on teaching a “small lesson to the Sikhs but the matter had got out of hand.” The army was conspicuously present unlike on the previous day. There were armored vehicles and Jawans on foot patrolling the deserted streets. It was not clear though whether there was a curfew in effect.
In the afternoon on the same day, I met a State Bank employee from Bharat Nagar (whose name again eludes my memory now). He took me through the small by-lanes of Bharat Nagar. The scene that greeted me is unforgettable. Everyone, it seems, had been “well-prepared” for a reprisal by the Sikhs. From small children to the elderly, everyone was armed with some lethal weapon or another: either rods, lathis, knives or swords (small firearms being relatively inaccessible in those days). This man told me not to worry and requested me to dispense with the idea of peace committees and that ‘they’ (the people of Bharat Nagar) would protect the colony from a Sikh reprisal, should they dare to attack. People hid stealthily in their homes in a way that only miscreants aware of their dirty deeds would. Rumours and falsehoods (spread in some parts of the city from loudspeakers used by police vans), had had the desired effect. This was terrorism in action.
It merits mention that the fear of reprisal that many wrong-doers carried should not lead anyone to think that this was a Hindu-Sikh riot we were witness to. It was a straightforward pogrom against the Sikhs of the city. So far as I know no Hindu died at the hands of an attacking Sikh. In places where the Sikhs tried to defend themselves against mobs, by gathering in Gurudwaras in some parts of the city, they were promptly disarmed and dispersed by the police, to facilitate subsequent slaying at the hands of lumpen mobs, giving further credence to the belief in the connivance of the police and the administration.
Later that afternoon, I met a Sikh family (from a few houses down the road from us) who were taking refuge in our neighbor’s house. They had left their own house on the morning of November 1, for fear of attack on their life and property. (Their house, in fact, was attacked on the 1st and just about everything was looted. The servants, however, managed to save the house from being burnt by the arsonists). They were quite shaken up, as was our immediate neighbor when we met her.
A couple of days later I met the family of one of my friends from college. Her father was a retired naval officer. They had been rescued from their place in a Trans-Yamuna colony by other friends and were now taking refuge at their place in one of the officers’ houses in New Delhi. They were still shaken up from their experience when I saw them.
A descent into hell: what the city had experienced
On the morning of November 4, 1984, alongwith several of my friends, I went to Lajpat Bhawan (near Moolchand hospital in South Delhi) from where relief and rehabilitation work was being organized for the victims of the violence. Only when we started listening to reports of people from different parts of the city did one realize how widespread and intense the scale of violence had been, and how much had been hidden behind the sanctimonious TV coverage of the last rites for Mrs. Gandhi’s. At that stage it was not known how many people had been killed. (In fact, it was not known until the Ahuja Committee submitted its report in August, 1987) Yet, even if a small fraction of the stories one was hearing had truth in them, it was clear that something on a scale quite out of the ordinary had taken place in the capital. And that the violence had lasted in some areas for three or four days. Common sense suggested that this could not have gone on without having the support and sanction of the state. The detailed documentation done by human rights groups in the coming weeks established just how elaborate this support was.
Given that the government was slow to enforce law and order, let alone bring succor to the afflicted, a citizens’ group, the Nagarik Ekta Manch, had been formed to organize the relief and rehabilitation effort. We promptly joined it and were assigned relief work in the Trans-Yamuna police station of Farsh Bazar, for the victims who had suffered some of the worst violence in the city, in the locality of Trilokpuri. It is now well documented that between 400 and 500 people lost their lives in this area alone, 150-200 of them in the infamous Block 32.
For the next 8-9 weeks a group of us worked at the Farsh Bazar Police Station. Such was the apathy of the police that this was one of the few police stations in the entire metropolis of Delhi where Sikhs had been offered shelter. Thousands of Sikh victims had been brought to Farsh Bazar after the army rescued them from their homes in Trilokpuri and nearby areas on November 3, 1984.
Our experience at the relief camp was sobering. Not only was it painful to witness at firsthand what the previous few days of barbarism had done to a beleaguered people. What was even more disturbing was listening to and recording the eye-witness testimonies of widows, orphans and the few men who survived the pogrom.
My very first memory of Farsh Bazar is that of a terror-stricken, dazed lot of people— wailing women and children, men (some of whom had even got their hair and beard shaved off to conceal their Sikh identity) physically hurt, some of them with blood still pouring forth from gaping wounds, old people looking lost all in all some 3000-3500 fugitives, all Sikhs, mostly Labhanas from Sindh and Rajasthan.
As we started working with the victims, the fact that they were all Sikhs, and most of us—volunteers—working with them were Hindu, faded into the shadows. Even the few young men—and there were very few—who swore revenge on their assailants and assassins never spoke of harming Hindus in general. They only wished to avenge themselves on precisely the ones who had taken part in the pogrom. They were all known characters. In fact, the most notable fact of our experience at Farsh Bazar was that it deepened everyone’s humanity, the communities we came from becoming a marginal fact in the midst of the enormity of the suffering. The victims were immensely grateful for the help they were receiving. We, on the other hand, were too shaken and moved to leave the suffering to their fates. Within us too, there was intense anger, pain, and indignation.
Over the next few weeks we carried out relief work, distributing medicines, food, clothing, blankets and other necessities to the victims. During the course of our work we heard an endless number of sordid tales about the Anti-Sikh violence in Trans-Yamuna areas. From the evidence that poured forth, it was plain that the violence in places like Trilokpuri, where some of the goriest stories came from, had been well-organized. There was a pattern to the killings. People were felled with lathis, rods, bricks and stones. Kerosene, which was supplied to mobs by the party workers of the Congress, was poured upon them and they were set fire to. Almost every victim pointed out the role of the police—they either colluded with the miscreants actively or watched passively as the mobs indulged in arsoning and killing.
For volunteers like us, there was no reason for disbelieving the accounts given by the victims. A terrorized community, still grieving over its multiple bereavements, is not prone to lying or exaggeration. Taken at face value the cumulative evidence emerging from different parts of the city pointed over-whelming towards a high level of planning and organization behind the pogrom.
Chilling testimonies
We would arrive at Farash Bazar after breakfast and work there till the evening. Every day we helped distribute relief and supplies and recorded testimonies and eye-witness accounts from a dazed people who had lived, till just the other day, in Trilokpuri. Now they could not dream of returning to the places where their old homes once stood. Fear was only one part of the reason for this. Weighing heavier in their perception were memories of their loved ones humiliated before their eyes before being put to death.
Our testimonies were used by the team from PUCL-PUDR (the human rights groups in Delhi) to compile the section of their report on the pogrom that dealt with Trans-Yamuna colonies. Thereafter, the testimonies were also taken by those legally qualified to do so. Moreover, all the evidence—and there is no dearth of it whatsoever—has been presented to the inquiry commissions. Thanks to the wonders of information technology, it can be sampled at many different websites today. Here | will just try to recall a few significant impressions that stay in memory and note some of the salient patterns that the testimonies revealed.
Widows would bring before us their wounded children, some of them with burn marks on their bodies. Some of the older women, who had lost many younger members of their families, sometimes their own sons and daughters, wished for an early death for themselves instead of having to negotiate the grief and sorrow of the years that remained to them. They found it hard to believe that people who had been their neighbors for years could betray them to killing mobs so readily and in some cases even turn upon them themselves. Some of the Sikh men, especially the younger ones, had their heads and beards shaved.
The death squads were recruited from neighboring villages. They were mainly Bhangis, Ahirs, Gujars and Jats, in most cases accompanied by local residents of Trilokpuri. It is pertinent to point out that the Trans-Yamuna resettlement colonies were vote-banks of the Congress party and the then Member of Parliament from East Delhi, H.K.L.Bhagat (who became the Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting under Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1985), who was named in hundreds of testimonies, was one of the masterminds of the pogrom in this part of the city. (He won the December 1984 parliamentary elections by a record margin.) Hundreds of affidavits gathered by volunteers and collated in several reports testify to the fact that early in the morning on November 1, 1984, street weapons such as sticks and iron rods were distributed by Congress (I) leaders to young men willing to kill. Oil was supplied to the mobs from the many depots owned by the same leaders. State-owned transportation, such as DTC buses, was made available to move them to the site of action.
There was a pattern to the carnage. Typically, Sikh boys and men were first beaten mercilessly with sticks and rods, then doused in kerosene or petrol and finally, they were garlanded with burning tyres. Sikh boys were often disguised as girls to escape lynching mobs. Most of the Sikh women in Trilokpuri were raped. Girls of ten or eleven to women of 75 or 80 were raped, some of them several times. Some of my female friends recorded painful testimonies of gang-rapes of women in the presence of their own children, overseen by the main organizers from the Congress Party near drains and Nalas. The aim, evidently, was to utterly insult, humiliate and butcher the Sikhs. Even male children were not spared, Bhagat himself was heard calling to the mob “Yeh Saanp Ka Bachha Hai, Isko Maro, Mat Choro, Agar Chhoroge Toh Bada Dukh Dega” (“He is the child of a snake, kill him, don’t spare him, if you spare him, he will give a lot of pain.”) This was a pogrom, not a riot.
The fact that the patterns of violence were so similar throughout the city of Delhi should put paid to the view that it was all but a spontaneous outburst of rage and indignation against the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi. Moreover, as some observers have pointed out, in most riots the number of people killed is smaller than the number of people injured. The fact that in the pogrom of 1984 the situation was reversed only further establishes the fact that the killings were well-organized and the assailants were granted adequate time to carry out the orders from above.
Several names, other than that of the satanically ubiquitous H.K.L. Bhagat, recurred in the testimonies. One was that of Dr. Ashok Kumar, a Congress (I) Councillor from the area who ran his clinic in Kalyanpuri, which adjoined Trilokpuri. According to the victims, it was he who organized a meeting in Trilokpuri on the evening of October 31 and masterminded the violence of the next two days, before the paramilitary forces, and later the army, came to Trilokpuri. According to the survivors, Dr. Ashok led the mobs the next day and incited them to kill.
Another name that kept coming up was that of the Congress (I) Pradhan (chief) of Trilokpuri, Rampal Saroj, a Bhagat loyalist, at whose house the main organizing meeting was held by Bhagat and Dr. Ashok on the evening of October 31. Several women testified that he ordered the rapes and led the mobs that killed their husbands. Two decades on, Saroj is now apparently deceased!
The name of Kishori Lal kept being mentioned. He became notorious as “the butcher of Trilokpuri”. He is in fact one of the few people who has been sent to prison for life for his role in the massacres. In 1996, he was convicted of having murdered at least eight men. Most of the victims were poor, Labhana Sikhs originally from Sindh or Rajasthan: daily wage earners, auto-rickshaw drivers, coolies, mechanics and small artisans.
To this day, every now and again, images of the widows, their children and the few adult Sikh male survivors of the pogrom in Trilokpuri, return to haunt. I recall, though I have not met them in years, Gurdeep Kaur, Barfi Bai, Bijar Bai, Darshan Kaur, Harbhajan Kaur, Sunder Singh, Inder Singh and Mohan Singh, among others. Many of them were moved from Farsh Bazar to Tilak Vihar in West Delhi six months after the pogrom.
Where was the police? Conniving! There is much evidence to show that Soorvir Singh Tyagi, the Station House Officer (SHO) at Kalyanpuri police station, prevented his own constables from stopping violent mobs and effectively ‘oversaw’ the violence. At one stage on November 1, when the mob was attacking and burning the Gurudwara in Trilokpuri, a group of Sikhs got together to defend it. When they were pelted with stones they returned the favor, only to be told by the policemen that they must return to their homes now and stay indoors rather than indulge in violence. Soon after, the rampaging mobs started arriving at their doorsteps and began the spree of arson and murders. There is also plenty of evidence, well-documented by now, that SHO Tyagi did not register reports from or of Sikh victims. He is also known to have recorded omnibus reports (for tens of murders and accused!) instead of the legal requirement of separate ones. Apparently, there were instructions from senior officers to club all riot cases pertaining to Trilok Puri in one FIR (First Information Report). The cowardly complicity of the police was critical to the success of the violence.
One of the official inquiries, carried out by the Kusum Mittal Committee had indicted a number of police officers throughout the city for dereliction of duty, criminal negligence and often overseeing mob violence in which Sikhs were burnt to death right before their very eyes. Tehelka.com published a piece earlier this year in which they claimed that not a single police officer from those crime-filled days has been properly prosecuted. Many have retired and those still in service have received promotions. The pension of one of the senior retired officers has been reduced by 30%. ‘Justice’ can sometimes be that precisely apportioned!
One morning that November I visited some blocks of Trilokpuri—including the notorious Block 32-with one of the victims, an auto-rickshaw driver Mohan Singh (whose two brothers were burnt to death), and some other volunteers. I have never seen anything like that before or since in my life. The area wore a dreadful, haunted look. Entire blocks of houses had been burnt down. A strong odour of kerosene still hung around in some of the courtyards. Burnt scooters and auto rickshaws, mangled metal from furniture and assorted equipment were strewn around the narrow lanes. There was plenty of ash and in some places; remains of human clothing eerily lay about, sometimes close to unmistakably human-shaped stains on the ground. The stench of corpses was yet discernible, even though they had been cleared out several days prior to the day that we visited.
I remember the evening that H.K.L. Bhagat came to see the Sikh victims at Farsh Bazar. The widows did not let him enter the premises and booed him away from there. The man who later on became the Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court, Ranganath Mishra, was the one who headed the first major official inquiry into the pogrom. About Bhagat he concluded thus: “Mr. Bhagat, being a sitting MP and Minister, was not likely to misbehave in the manner alleged.” That’s all. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Mishra had such faith in Bhagat’s integrity that he never even asked to cross-examine him!
Over 1000 Sikhs were killed in Bhagat’s constituency in East Delhi alone! If Bhagat did no wrong, as Mishra seems to claim, then how is it that neither he nor any of the other Congress eminences named in the unofficial reports on the pogrom (Sajjan Kumar, Jagdish Tytler, Dharamdass Shastri, among others) ever filed defamation lawsuits against the writers of these public reports?
Such was their immunity, that between 1984 and 1989, Bhagat held four cabinet ministerial posts under Rajiv Gandhi. He was expelled from the Congress in 1998 (it had little to do with his role in the 1984 pogrom), is now politically extinct and reportedly suffering from due dementia and loss of memory. One of the spearheads of the 1984 pogrom, he is himself 84 years old today!
Explaining the pogrom
“When a great tree falls the earth shakes.” Rajiv Gandhi had seemed to defend the violence in these words, weeks after the pogrom. What he perhaps forgot to add was that the earth shakes much more just before an election. For, imagine that the assassination had happened some months after the elections of December, 1984 (which Mrs. Gandhi’s party might even have lost!). It is debatable if the pogrom would still have been organized, and with such precise preparation.
How else does one explain the pogrom? Given the failure of the Indian state to address the abiding misery of masses of people, every incumbent government of independent
India after Nehru left the stage in 1964, has had a difficult time convincing the electorate that it should be voted back to power. (In fact, since the 1971, the 1984 polls have been the only one—out of 9—parliamentary elections in which the incumbent party or coalition was returned to office.) Mrs. Gandhi’s government, after “the Punjab problem” and Bluestar, not to mention corruption, rising prices and large ongoing unemployment, was not in a different position either. Her assassination gave her party and its whips a perverse opportunity to capitalize (pardon the pun!) on “the sympathy vote”. And if it could be conveyed to the electorate as to just how angry the public was with the assassination (for which, what better means than a pogrom like the one we saw), even better. Till 1984 it was somehow assumed widely that only the RSS and its party outfit, the BJP, played communal politics on a large scale. In November, 1984, the Congress lost its innocence in the eyes of the public. It realized now the political gains it too could make from a communal strategy. A “Hindu” had been assassinated and “Hindus” were not going to take this on their chin. Enough was enough.
We have seen this sort of communal baiting of voters on an intensified scale ever after. The BJP and the Sangh Parivar of course turned it into the staple of Indian politics, before being decimated at last year’s polls. 1984 paved the way for the assault on Babri Masjid, the Mumbai riots of 1992 and the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat a few years ago, to name only the most prominent legacies. In this sense, the pogrom of 1984 intensified and accelerated the communalization and criminalization of Indian politics. The elections after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination were advanced in order to garner the sympathy vote of Hindus. The Delhi lumpens had served their purpose when it became clear that Rajiv’s communal campaign-relying on such slogans as “why do you feel uncomfortable when you sit in a taxi driven by a person from another state?”—would have a landslide victory. The opposition party that claimed to be defending the interests of Hindus, the BJP, managed to get only 2 seats, while the Congress stomped home with over 400 (in an election in which just over 500 parliamentary seats being contested).
They did a better job of convincing the Hindu majority that they could defend them. Communal politics had come of age in India, under the able stewardship of the secular Congress (I)!
To me, as to most other observers and witnesses, the 1984 pogrom was entirely preventable, because it was entirely organized. No less than ten official inquiry commissions have submitted their reports by now. While most of them have avoided stating the obvious, the mountains of evidence that they present leaves little doubt as to the main conclusion: the pogrom was organized by senior members of the Delhi unit of the ruling Congress Party, most likely under orders from above (when you recall that riots were also instigated in so many other cities of North India). Indeed, it appears that the authorities could have prevented, or halted the violence once it had started, if they had wanted to. Even if Rajiv Gandhi could be excused (since he was grieving over his personal loss), Home Minister and future Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, could not be pardoned for several days of inaction. If the army could be called out in sufficient strength in South Delhi areas by the evening of November 1, having already been put on notice by the authorities the previous day, then why couldn’t it be used earlier, and why not elsewhere, for instance in Trans-Yamuna localities, too? For the grand funeral on November 3 after all, the army was present in the selfsame city in its full regalia.
