The army had been deployed in strength in Amritsar, where no rioting had happened. Clearly, the authorities feared reprisals there for what the Congress leaders had planned and accomplished in Delhi and some other parts of North India. Delhi “stabilized” only after November 3, thanks mainly to the efforts of the army. Sikhs in Trans-Yamuna localities did not get attention and relief till the army arrived. Of course it needed to be deployed earlier. Obviously, Congress leaders, beginning with Rajiv himself perhaps, were not going to allow that!

The massive censorship of the media—both Indian and foreign (reporters had their films seized at the airports)—soon after the pogrom is further evidence to establish the fact that the massacres were ordered from the highest levels of the state apparatus.

Why it shall happen again, unless…

“Congress has got a clean chit in Delhi. Bharatiya Janata Party has been cleared in Gujarat. Riots will continue if you don’t punish the guilty. There is no guarantee that our children will not avenge 1984 on innocent people in future.”

— Pogrom survivor Mohan Singh, speaking to a reporter in 2005

“While in Nov.1984 democratic values were slaughtered and soul of

Indian constitution was burned in daylight by the rioters, what

happened after the riots was still worse and the justice itself has been

slaughtered by sheer non-investigation and total absence of concern.

In the name of investigation only an eyewash has been done. The

manner in which the prosecution has proceeded and the trial in these

cases has proceeded speaks volumes about the health of the criminal

justice system. By simply delaying the trial and delaying the

investigation, aged and old witnesses have either become extinct or

untraceable and the accused get benefit.”

“The manner in which the trail of the riot cases had proceeded is

unthinkable in any civilized country. In fact, the inordinate delay in trial

of the rioters had legitimized the violence and the criminality. A system

which permits the legitimized violence and criminals through the

instrumentalities of the state to stifle the investigation, cannot be relied

upon to dispense basic justice uniformly to the people. It amounts to a

total wiping out of the rule of law”.

— Delhi High Court Additional Sessions Judge, S.N. Dhingra

Let us dream a little and speculate how an honest government and a responsible leadership might have acted on November 1, 1984, after there was enough knowledge (as numerous witnesses have deposed to several inquiry commissions) that the capital city was ablaze with deadly violence. It would have begun by establishing a central control room (just as Nehru had asked Mountbatten to do in 1948, after Gandhi’s assassination, to pre-empt communal rioting) which would have been directly answerable to the Prime Minister. Curfew and shoot-at-sight orders would have been given across the city. If the police was unsuccessful in controlling the violence, paramilitary forces, ready for the specific purpose, would have been called out in strength immediately. If the arsoning and killing was not brought in control within a few hours by them either, the army would have been deployed. The violence would have died a necessary death on November 1 itself.

Thereafter, a high-powered, impartial inquiry commission would have been asked to conduct a time-bound investigation into the riots. They would have been allowed to examine all police files and cross-examine the full range of witnesses. No individual, no matter how powerful, would have been spared thorough cross-examination. The results of the investigation would have been released to the media and the public. The truth would have been known, perhaps in 1984 itself.

The only problem is that the election result might have become significantly more doubtful if it had turned out that the violence was instigated by the ruling Congress Party. And Rajiv Gandhi, in order to save political honour, would have had to resign.

The fact that none of the above transpired only increases the probability of foul play near the very top of the decision-making hierarchy of the day. For, if any one out of Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and Zail Singh were profoundly disturbed by the violence and wished to stop it, they had plenty of time and power to do so.

There are people who believe that the 1984 pogrom against the Sikhs was a one-off political event, against a small minority, that it shall not happen again. I am afraid I cannot agree with them. Copious evidence to the contrary has already appeared. Even if some have argued that the 1992-93 Mumbai riots (and there the use of the word riots is perhaps less inappropriate) cannot be compared to the 1984 pogrom, since several hundred Hindus died in the former in addition to over a thousand Muslims, it is surely undeniable that the Gujarat genocide against Muslims in 2002, overseen as it was by the Modi government in Gujarat, and allowed by the Vajpayee administration in New Delhi falls into the same category. In both cases, the state went on holiday and the rule of law was suspended to make the massive public violence possible. Even in the case of Mumbai, while most Hindus were killed by Muslims, Muslims were killed both by police bullets and at the hands of mobs led by the Shiv Sena.

Mumbai 1992 and Gujarat 2002 reveal the truth of the view that deadly political habits and the ailments of history do not die away till they are treated at the root. Unless and until justice is done (and not just in terms of the monetary compensation which the Prime Minister has yet again promised to those who suffered the inhumanities of 1984) and those men in uniform, and kurta-clad leaders in harness who still occupy high offices, who conspired to write the first chapter of its kind in urban barbarity in post-independence India, are made to face the full music of the law, one can safely speculate that the demons of the communal past will continue to haunt urban India and further erode the fragile fabric of the Indian republic.

It seems that the old wisdom of the demonstrative power of punishment, to make similar crimes by others less likely in the future, has been forgotten by today’s rulers. When veteran, seasoned killers like Tytler and Sajjan Kumar roam freely, their crimes forgotten by all except the ones who suffered from them, it is scarcely surprising that Modi and his Mafioso’s in Gujarat get bold enough to commit barbaric deeds on the streets in 2002. Not only do we nourish outlaws in our midst. We elect them to parliament and give them such civic responsibilities as a union or a chief minister ship. Moreover, not a single police official has been convicted for the crimes of 1984 either, while many have received promotions, making a mockery of the police service.

As a result of the machinations of Congressmen like Bhagat, Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and Dharamdass Shastri, there are several thousand Sikh orphans in Delhi alone. They were toddlers when their parents were killed. Most of them have grown up in bitter surroundings with strong feelings of revenge. They are unlikely to be stilled until they see the law working for them. For, consider the most striking fact of all. 21 years after the pogrom, a mere half a dozen people have been convicted for nearly 3000 murders!

This level of injustice and abuse of human rights would be unacceptable under a dictatorial regime. It is one of the miraculous ironies of the practice of political ethics today that not only is India presented to the world as a paragon of freedom and democracy but that the United States, so eager to pounce on far lesser crimes in the case of countries that try to carve out a path independent of it (such as Cuba, Venezuela or Iran), is quite happy to leave unopened the many cupboards in which the skeletons being concealed by Indian governments are ‘hidden’ and are rattling. Concessions to an ally in the “war on terror”!

This, of course, is quite consistent with the standard two-toned practice of US foreign policy. However, we also live in a time in which governments across the world are trying to come to terms with the injustices of history. Human rights commissions are being appointed and international standards of justice are being invoked by countries as varied as South Africa, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Chile, France and Germany, not to speak of the growing pressure that is being put on the Bush administration in Washington to face up not only to crimes of the past but to stop the ongoing violations of freedom and human rights in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and the secret archipelago of torture chambers set up by the CIA worldwide.

The small, petty everyday crimes of individuals are as nothing compared to the weight of the collective crimes of humanity, when a group of people belonging to a certain nation or a certain religion, caste or community choose to hurl their collective might upon vulnerable members of another group. The damage is particularly lethal if the full force and legitimacy of a modern state is behind it. If a youth is caught stealing a cookie in California, he may end up in prison for some months or years. If you steal a continent, you may end up becoming the United States of America. Get caught killing a man and you are a murderer and will suffer the cumulative justice of the law. Kill a million and you may become the Secretary of State. Such is the unwritten code that terrorists everywhere seize upon. We have reached the point where one rule for the state and another for terrorists simply won’t do. It is plainly inconsistent with the rule of law as with any self-respecting system of ethics.

Justice in India, as elsewhere, seems to follow in the tracks of the same moral hypocrisies as elsewhere. An event of the magnitude of the 1984 pogrom, which accounted for three thousand brutal murders, orphaned 4000 children, widowed thousands of women, displaced 50,000 people, and inflicted pain and humiliation on an epic scale, unfamiliar in India since 1947, calls for far greater public attention and collective moral scrutiny than has been forthcoming hitherto. Might define right in India too, and believes itself to be in the right, merely because it has the power to make it seem so. The truth is that only those who have suffered at the hands of such routine injustice actually have a sense for what is right.

It is worth recalling that the papers of the Mishra Commission, the main official inquiry into the pogrom, have never been made public. Much evidence, especially the crucial handwritten notes of Ved Marwah (who headed the very first inquiry into the pogrom), has also been destroyed, because, as an honest officer, he was cutting too close to the bone. Why isn’t Manmohan’s new government, that prides itself on transparency and accountability, making the information public?

The time has arrived to face together these elementary truths about the world we live in.

There are those who would like us all to forgive and forget (“It happened two decades ago, after all”). Darshan Kaur, who was widowed by the 1984 pogrom, and dared to identify H.K.L. Bhagat in public, has this observation for them. While speaking to a reporter after the Nanavati Commission tabled its report in August, she said: “Let Sonia Gandhi forgets Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi first.” Leaders of the ilk of Narasimha Rao have relied in the past on the short life of public memory to evade the delivery of justice and save the face of their party. But how will they get past the several thousand embittered hearts, many of them bonded by common suffering and ghettoized in one-room tenements in West Delhi’s Tilak Vihar since 1985? How will they assuage the seething anger of the young people who have grown up in the wake of the pogrom? When an atrocity of such magnitude has occurred, whitewashes won’t do. Before a line is drawn under the whole event, wisdom demands that justice be done. Only then can any genuine peace and harmony can be expected.

And yet, all it evokes from our Prime Minister (and not Tytler, Sajjan Kumar and others) is a feeble apology, 21 years after the event, when many of the perpetrators, survivors and witnesses of the pogrom that escalated the barbarism of independent India, are long gone, dead. There has to be a minimal sense of balance: the atonement has to be in proportion to the atrocities. If you apologize, you clearly take responsibility for what happened. But then it behooves you to so so completely. In matters of justice there is no half-way house.

The crimes of the Congress are serious. That it left the fate of the country’s capital city in the hands of barbaric lumpens for several days, that it set a catastrophic precedent for the future, that it threw dust in the face of the constitution, that it brought a more or less permanent loss of prestige to the highest offices of the Government of India and shame to the country, that it continues to insult the intelligence of thousands of eyewitnesses who helplessly saw with their own senses the evidence of state betrayal of the people and the constitution, above all, that it alienated a loyal community from the rest of the country, abandoning it to suffer the humiliation and pain in silence, all this constitutes grounds for not mere apology but the appointment of a South-Africa style public Truth and Reconciliation Commission which will see to it that justice is done and faith in the rule of law slowly restored.

When injustices have been so prolonged and almost institutionalized, as is the case with 1984, this is what is minimally necessary. The likes of Tytler and Bhagat ought not only to be punished fully and fairly by the law but made to apologize publicly to the widows and orphans of 1984 on TV, before the eyes and ears of the entire nation. Likewise, the widows and survivors of 1984 have to be given the chance to tell their stories on TV. Only this will reveal the full scope and shame of the crimes to the nation and make the aspiring Modis of the future think twice before acting as they have done in the past.

If the Congress thinks that Modi’s crimes in Gujarat are reprehensible, then minimal moral consistency demands, no matter what the short-term political risks, that it take a harsher view of its own crimes, the ones that set the tone for others to follow. If need be, a thorough purge of the party leadership, as much as of its rank and file, must be carried out if the party is to survive in the long term as a political force of any secular and moral credibility. If one may be allowed to express some expectant optimism, if only to save the futures that we all imagine today, the Congress leadership should strike an open public deal with the BJP opposition that they will come clean on 1984 if the latter do so on Gujarat, 2002. Once everyone is on the same page there is a chance of a new dawn. Otherwise, as one of the Sikh survivors from 1984 once said, “yeh sab chalta rahega” (“these things will go on”).

Only a few meager steps towards justice have been taken. The resignations in August this year of two of the chief architects of the 1984 pogrom, Minister for NRI affairs Jagdish Tytler and Member of Parliament Sajjan Kumar, after they had (once again) been named in the Nanavati Commission report, is certainly salutary (though it must be noted that they tendered their resignation to party president Sonia Gandhi and not to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh!). Last month, under massive public pressure and media exposure, the Union Home Ministry has asked the cases against Jagdish Tytler, Dharamdass Shastri and Sajjan Kumar to be reopened. All this is certainly welcome. But far, very far, from enough.

The list of culprits is long, the masterminds still very much at large (if they haven’t reached their graves already). Justice, by being so delayed, has already been largely denied. The surviving Sikh widows and orphans of 1984 find the situation unacceptable. Repeatedly, the guilty have been named by one commission of enquiry after another. Each time the government has asked the police to withdraw the case. The fear,I suppose, is that if one Tytler or Bhagat is squarely convicted he may squeak some secret in public which would reveal the culpability of bigger heads, who must be saved from rolling. One wonders who they might be, given that the three biggest ones in India in 1984—Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Home Minister Narasimha Rao and the President Giani Zail Singh are all dead!

As things stand, the farce is hard to escape. In some cases, the accused, the accusers and witnesses have all already died. Ram Pal Saroj was one of the masterminds of the pogrom in Trilokpuri, named in hundreds of affidavits. He is deceased, and so is his accuser, Santokh Singh, whose three sons had been killed by a mob led by Saroj! Even if you are familiar with the labyrinthine standards of Indian bureaucracy, the absurdity catches you by surprise.

Justice is truly being mocked when the tenth inquiry commission into the pogrom has asked for further investigation, a generation after the events happened. As the quotation from the Delhi High Court judge above indicates, the investigations have been shoddy throughout, ever since the Marwah Commission was not allowed to complete its work in November 1984, when it had started to investigate senior police officers.

It would have been simpler, easier and immensely more straightforward for Rajiv’s government to have declared in 1985 itself that it was not going to be possible for justice to be offered for the victims of the violence after his mother’s assassination, that it was tragic and unfortunate and that’s about it, his “great tree” metaphor capturing the essence of the matter. But the presence to constitutional loyalty must be kept up if political legitimacy is to be sustained in a democracy. And so, 20 years and 10 inquiry commissions later, we are not yet closer to truth (let alone to justice). “We still do not know the truth”, the Prime Minister admitted in the Rajya Sabha in August. He conceded that “to err is human: there were lapses.” Error? Lapses? One after another, by one powerful state functionary after another? For 24, 48, 72 hours? 5, 10, 20 years? There are issues on which even unusual courtesy from a newcomer to politics has a hollow, faithless ring.

Failure to restore public faith in the rule of law would lead, as always, to people taking the law into their own hands as and when they feel the need or get half a chance. Then one can also expect informal forms of retributive justice. Memory still brings back the images of Arjun Dass and Lalit Maken, two of the Congressmen named in the original PUCL report as having organized the violence, who met their fates on the streets of the capital in the 1980s.

Enough of the truth is already known in order to bring charges. Surely some utterly important person in the present UPA government must have the courage (and the Nehruvian wisdom of foresight) to draw the obvious conclusions from the evidence which is already in public view. Is there anyone there? Rahul Gandhi?

Justice, if and when it arrives, will not remove the trauma of the widows and the orphans. It will diminish it. It will go some distance towards reducing the possibility of such moral catastrophes in the future by restoring to a degree, public faith in, and more significantly fear of, the rule of law.

Most laudable and necessary is the effort of independent lawyers and human rights advocates, such as Harvinder Phoolka in Delhi and Jaskaran Kaur’s group “Ensaaf” in the US, among so many others. Without their sustained efforts the little justice that has been earned would not have come about. They are fighting with enormous courage and grit on an issue which has profound significance not just for the Sikh community but for the legitimacy of the Indian state, and the long-term survival of the Indian democratic polity itself.

That there has been such little collective public reflection not only on the pogrom of 1984, but on carnages that took place in Bombay and Gujarat over the next two decades only shows how weak Indian democracy, let alone its putative secularism, actually is. Surely democracy is something more than the mechanical casting and counting of votes once every five years to measure and compare the popularity of equally corrupt and opportunistic political groups? Without open dialogue and vigorous debate, both in and outside the parliament, especially over matters of grave public injustices done to communities, democracy becomes a cosmetic exercise in political futility, a curse to the idea of citizenship. It begins to resemble a tyrannical system whereby parties take turns at looting the public exchequer and manipulating (and sometimes killing parts of) the voting public to maintain themselves in power. Even a monarchy in the hands of a loved king could do better.

Terrorism, brutally demonstrated

The Indian government, in a grand alliance with the increasingly exposed Uncle Sam, claims to be fighting these days a war on terror. Manmohan Singh and his government have been all too keen to end terrorism. Not a day passes when we don’t hear some official indignation over “cross-border terrorism”. But, like their worthy counterparts across two oceans, they don’t seem to wish to understand why it arises. In the Indian case, it is altogether suicidal to ignore recent history, whether it is in the case of Kashmir or Punjab. If Indira Gandhi could speak from her grave, she would ask the present rulers to be wiser.

We are indignant at 62 people being blown up in the capital by terrorists last month. But just imagine, for that is minimally what one must do at this late stage in the drama, 3000 innocents brutally murdered under the sun, by armed mobs relieved of the constraints of the law, their bodies desecrated with burning tyres, thousands of women raped, many of them multiple times and before their own children, their places of worship, houses and little shops set ablaze, policemen and political leaders guiding and masterminding the whole performance from the shadows, the army kept in the sidelines for days to allow the orgy to be completed, and all of this too in the capital of “the world’s largest democracy”, while dignitaries and leaders from across the world were paying their last respects to the departed leader only some miles away from the action…here was terrorism, if ever someone needed a laboratory demonstration and a living definition…

If terrorism is the use of violence against innocents for political ends, both the Delhi pogrom of 1984 and the Gujarat genocide of 2002, conducted strictly with electoral goals in mind, provide text-book instances. The only problem is that the BUP-led opposition recognizes the horror of the former, the ruling Congress of the latter, but neither of both. A remarkable state of affairs indeed.

Some personal reflections

For us in India, 1984 doesn’t just mean Operation Bluestar, the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and North India. For, within weeks of the pogrom a similar number of people were accounted for by the gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Orwellian premonitions for the year were certainly validated in India! It was a ghastly year.

The pogrom happened, among other places, in New Delhi. Remember, one is not talking about some backwater town in the North East or some remote hamlet in the Kashmir valley. One is describing the events in the capital city of the world’s largest democracy, which prides itself on its secular credentials and is often pointed to as a showpiece of democratic success in the Third World.

It is as though some few thousand African-Americans were murdered by white supremacists in the heart of Washington DC, over a period of a few days, while Dick Cheney asked his administration and security forces to go on vacation, in the wake of the assassination of Bush by two of his own security men (who happened to be black). Even by the appalling standards set by the Bush administration recently, it is hard to imagine!

But that is exactly what was set in motion in Delhi in November 1984. Even if in some corner of my heart I have had an affection for the city of Delhi, I never had a high opinion of it as a place hospitable for human beings to live in. After 1984, one’s faith and trust in the city nosedived into a moral abyss. 1984 was a barbaric reminder of all the blood that history generally floats on. Delhi, especially, has known plenty of bloodbaths in its long, violent past. But reading about all that in the history books was one thing. To be fated to witness it with one’s own senses quite another. Somehow, one had never imagined that such ghastliness could come to pass in independent India. Our illusions of secular freedom suffered a mortal blow in those first days of November 1984.

I have never felt as physically insecure, before or since. One normally takes the physical surroundings and social circumstances of our lives to be steady and stable, a yardstick against which change can be measured over time. One never imagines the environment itself as a ceaseless movement which only offers the appearance of steadiness and stability. 1984 changed that for many of us, perhaps forever. Nothing in my experience prior to that November had ever wrecked the ‘givens’ of everyday life as mortally as the well-orchestrated pogrom of 1984 did.

Within hours one’s sense of security was shattered forever. The fickle fragility of human life lay exposed to the lethal violence of mass frustration, which seemed to have lain just inches below the surface of social peace. It seemed as though anyone in the city of Delhi with adequate power and resources could any time hire a willing mob to rob, plunder, burn, desecrate, maim, rape or kill. And if the state itself wished to expand its power, by demonstrating it ‘informally’, there were enough knives on hire to slash through the butter of vulnerable humanity, as long as the police and the security forces could be asked to look the other way, or better still, enjoy the orgy themselves.

Every piece of the state’s administrative machinery—the political leadership, the parliament, the bureaucracy, the police, the army, the judiciary—every nut and bolt in the power structure could be sent on holiday to pave the way for opportunistic, wanton violence to do its work. As a friend observed at the time, it was under Rajiv Gandhi’s genteel leadership that the pogrom was organized. One can only imagine the bestiality that would have been summoned for the occasion had his fascist brother been still alive. Yes, there are things to be thankful for, even in the darkest moments of our lives!

This is the first time I have written anything about the horrors of 1984. Like most people who were witness to the terrible events of those days, I have found it hard to relate what I saw and heard with my own senses or heard from victims of the violence shortly after the events had transpired. In the hierarchy of horrors that the modern world offers, the pogrom of 1984 surely ranks very high. That human beings can get so dehumanized as to inflict such unimaginable and cowardly brutality on their neighbors and fellow-citizens is a sobering realization of the fragility of the modern human condition. There is no progress. Humanity just beats barbarically around the bush (pardon the pun, yet again). The wounds of history rarely heal, even when justice is done. And when justice is altogether denied, as it has been in the case of the victims of 1984 by one cowardly government after another, then the wounds linger and fester, hardening the arteries of collective memory and making the violence worse when the floodgates of anger and revenge reopen in some fragile future.

Meanwhile, for thousands who still like to hope for justice, who share the fate of people of courage like Darshan Kaur, Mohan Singh and their children, the heart carries prayers. May life grant them faith and fortitude in their suffering. Till a few years ago, whenever I took a train from Nizamuddin Railway Station in New Delhi, Sunder Singh, who worked as a coolie there, somehow always found me. I had met him at the Farsh Bazar relief camp. He lost many family members in Trilokpuri in 1984. And whenever we met, we embraced and smiled, with tears in our eyes.

Let’s forget freedom, democracy, civilization and the other deceitful slogans of our time. Let us only recall our humanity. We don’t need the rest.

(I finished this essay on November 14, 2005 which, as luck would have it, is Jawaharlal Nehru’s 116th birth anniversary, familiar to those of us who have gone to school in independent India, as “Children’s Day”.)

ASEEM SHRIVASTAVA is an independent writer. He can be reached

ataseem62@yahoo.com.