A Long Legacy of Organized Cowardice
The Winter in Delhi, 1984
by ASEEM SHRIVASTAVA
“I felt like a refugee in my own country. In fact, | felt like a Jew in Nazi
Germany.”
– Khushwant Singh
I write these lines on October 31, 2005. It is exactly 21 years to the day since Mrs. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards. The line quoted above refers to the experience of Sikhs in the days following the assassination, when it seemed as though India’s capital was leased out for some time to Satan, in order for the Sikh community to be taught “a lesson”.
For those readers outside India to whom Khushwant Singh is a stranger, think Thomas Friedman, the well-known, controversial, New York Times columnist. Imagine that a day arrives when Friedman was to issue a statement like the above, if Jews once again were to become a target for persecution in the United States. Till very recently, before the revolution in electronic media, Knushwant Singh was probably the best known journalist in the English print media in India. Moreover, he was also very close to the Nehru-Gandhi family, his magazine The Illustrated Weekly of India and the widely-circulating newspapers he edited never failing to heap sycophantic praise not just on Indira Gandhi, but even on her fascist son, Sanjay. But the pogrom against Sikhs in North India in November 1984 was of such violent intensity, with sanction from the highest offices in the country, that even the normally fawning Khushwant Singh had to fall back on his lonely courage and speak out on behalf of his (minority) community, against a government led by a son of his beloved ruling family.
Leading up to Khushwant Singh’s volte-face was a telephone conversation with the then President of India, Giani Zail Singh on November 1, 1984. Fearful that a lumpen mob may be heading to attack him in his house in the heart of New Delhi, he called the President and asked him to act. The President responded by advising him to take shelter in a Hindu’s house, saying that this was the best that he could “do”! Bear in mind that the President is, by the Indian Constitution, the supreme commander of the armed forces. But then, even his own motorcade was stoned, en route home from the airport the previous day, when he returned from a visit abroad. Moreover, those who know the history of “the Punjab problem” also know Zail’s hand in it. Nothing like the memory of your own deceit and craftiness to paralyze you into cowardly inaction.
This was one of the reasons for Khushwant Singh’s turnaround.
No less than ten inquiry commissions have submitted their findings about the 1984 pogrom (one might add, so far), Nanavati’s (in August, 2005) being the latest among them. It bears reflection that the latest inquiry, like so many others before it, have recommended further investigation. What? Yes, you heard that right. There are crimes committed by the state where its powers allow it to hide the truth forever (the evidence is concealed, classified or destroyed). The crimes of the Indian state in 1984 do not belong in that category. About few atrocities in modern history anywhere has so much of the truth been established and circulated so widely, the evidence gathered so meticulously and assiduously by people belonging to all political stripes (including such stalwarts of orchestrated political violence as senior members of the BJP). And yet there are people who believe that more of the truth needs to be known! Even when eternal procrastinators like Narasimha Rao, who was the Home Minister of India during the 1984 pogrom, and perhaps rewarded for his pliant cowardice with Prime Minister Ship after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, are dead!
The events in Delhi in 1984 changed me and many others who were witness to them profoundly. They also changed the city and the country, for the carnage in Bombay in 1992 and the genocide in Gujarat in 2002, each accounting for thousands of brutal murders, cannot be understood properly without reckoning with the far-reaching legacy of what happened in Delhi in the wake of Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination. The Delhi pogrom suddenly enlarged the barbaric limits of the possible, especially so since it happened under the very eyes of power, in the heart of the capital of the “world’s largest democracy”. There were new lines drawn on the earth as to what was possible for men to do to their fellow-men and women in independent India, new guideposts as to what was acceptable in a society which laid claims to being ‘civilized’ and ‘democratic’.
21 years on, despite official apologies from Congress President Sonia Gandhi (in 1998) and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh earlier this year, justice is many leagues away. Though thousands have been accused, a mere half a dozen criminals have been convicted. And some of the accused are known to be dead!
Sikhs and Delhi before 1984: some personal memories
I first came to live in Delhi as a boarding student in Modern School, whose imposing red facade still catches the eye as one drives on Barakhamba Road, towards Connaught Circus. This was in 1978. I spent two years at Modern, one of them with a Sikh room-mate from Jammu. He was called Raju Sethi, who went on to play Ranji Trophy cricket and once hit a first-class ton against a West Indian attack led by Malcolm Marshall. He ended his career as captain of the Jammu and Kashmir side. He was gifted, but then that is never enough to play for India! I am not sure where Raju is now, but if I recall correctly his father used to run a thriving trucking business. Raju has probably grown it beyond recognition. In my recollection, Raju was friendly and high-spirited, and never far from a juicy expletive!
Raju was the second Sikh friend I made in life. I grew up in Patna, which, thanks to Guru Gobind Singh’s shrine at Patna Sahib, is home to so many Sikhs. While | did not have a Sikh in my class in school, there was the handsome Uttam Singh Mundy, two classes behind me, with whom I played some golf. While I surrendered the addictive sport during my college years in Delhi, since ideology got the better of me (I started thinking of it as a bourgeois pastime-—it is!), Uttam went on to become one of the leading professionals on the Indian and Asian circuits.
My parents of course had many Sikh friends in Patna, most of them high up in the bureaucracy. In Delhi, I myself made many more friends who happened to be Sikhs.
I preface my memories of 1984 with these remarks only because the sense of complete shock that one felt when Sikhs were attacked can only be explained by the common image of Sikhs that prevailed in North India at that time: I was not alone in carrying in my mind the picture of a vigorous, hard-working, spirited community with an infectious sense of humor, a terrific ability to laugh at themselves. Virtually every single one of the Sikhs that one came across conformed to this image. For Sikhs to be attacked, that too in Delhi, a city to whose life and history they had contributed so vitally was virtually unthinkable. The last time that Sikhs were vulnerable, leaving aside the partition riots of 1947 (in which everyone was vulnerable), was perhaps in the incipient days of Sikh faith, when so many of the best and bravest were martyred, some right in the heart of Delhi, to Mughal hegemony.
In public life Sikhs were prominent in the bureaucracy, the armed forces, the media, the academy, sports and entertainment, not to speak of politics. In 1984, the President of India, Giani Zail Singh, was a Sikh. How then was one to make sense of circumstances in which (turbaned) army Generals and bureaucrats who had retired from senior positions in the state machinery had to be hidden in ‘Hindu’ homes during those fateful days? To anyone familiar with Delhi in the 1970s and the early 1980s, Sikhs were a tough and successful lot. Who could dare to attack them? And why would they want to do so anyway?
Well, things had begun looking different since the movement for Sikh autonomy— sometimes secessionist, calling for a separate homeland for the Sikhs, Khalistan—had been launched in the 1970s, after the Anandpur Saheb Resolution. Everyone who lived through that time will be able to recall how the Congress, led by Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, not to forget Zail Singh, fanned the flames of Sikh terrorism in the early 1980s, primarily with the aim of toppling the ruling party in Punjab, the Akali Dal. It is true that several hundreds, if not thousands of people, over the course of the early 1980s, mostly Hindu, had been shot and killed in cold blood by the terrorists. (The reverse situation, in which security forces killed any number of mostly innocent Sikhs in “encounters”, happened for the next decade.) The movement culminated in the phenomenon of Bhindranwale, a tiger that was battened and brought to maturity by none other than Sanjay Gandhi. The Sikh extremists’ occupation of the Golden Temple in Amritsar in the summer of 1984 and the ensuing Operation Bluestar which put a brutal end to it, laid out the background against which the assassination of Mrs. Indira Gandhi and the pogroms organized to follow it are best understood.
That Mrs. Gandhi’s own political machinations paved part of the way to Bluestar is well-documented. What is also true is that the state’s attack on the most sacred shrine of the Sikhs—the Harminder Saheb—wounded the secular ethos of Indian politics. The 1992 attack on Babri Masjid is easy to understand after Bluestar. Hindu majoritarian identity—and the peculiar, unhistorical sense that Hindus were exclusively entitled to rule India in their own interests, the most ‘un-Hindu’ belief of all-was reinforced as a consequence of these two landmarks of criminal political folly, one carried out by the state, the other allowed by it. In the case of Bluestar, Mrs. Gandhi and her party ought not to have allowed things to get to the point where the attack on the Golden Temple became a fait accompli. Negotiations were possible up to a point, but the opportunities were squandered. Likewise, Rao’s Congress government in 1992 ought to have been more stringent in defending Babri from the barbarians and honoring the commitment to secularism promised in India’s constitution. We continue to pay the price for the fact that these things were not done.
The 1984 pogrom against the Sikhs happened in the wake of the assassination. To understand is not to justify: it is by now quite thoroughly documented that the Congress Party under Rajiv Gandhi instigated the “riots”, as though the fact that the assassination on October 31, 1984 was carried out by two of Mrs. Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards, made the whole Sikh community culpable. The fact that justice yet remains to be done, 21 years on, is one of the reasons why I write this.
October 31, 1984: “Kuchh bhi ho sakta hai!” (“Anything can happen!”)
To this day, October 31, 1984 strikes me as a day which set the tone for the history of India in the decades to follow. The Bombay carnage of 1992 and the Gujarat genocide of 2002 are only two ugly milestones in the recent history of Indian barbarism that could have been averted had the victims of 1984 received due justice in time. By its effective procrastination and denial of justice, the state made it possible for lumpen elements and their leaders in Indian cities to imagine that they could get away with murder as long as the government of the day gave them the signal and a holiday from the law.
On the morning of that fateful day I found myself in the University of Delhi, at the Delhi School of Economics, where I was studying for a Master’s degree. While we were in class, there appeared to be some restlessness among the students outside the window. They were running around with their cups of tea, looking for someone with a transistor. Since there was no cricket match on that day one couldn’t tell what the excitement was about. During the recess we heard what an astonishing piece of news was at the time: Mrs. Gandhi had been shot. People all around—her sympathizers and critics alike—were in a state of total disbelief and shock. After all, it was probably easier to imagine Mt. Everest melting into the ocean than to imagine India without Indira! There was no immediate announcement on All India Radio. However, all programmes seemed to have been suspended. Instead, there was the dirge-like drone of a Sarangi, from which everyone rightly concluded that the rumors were more than just that, though many people felt that it was probably another VVIP, not Mrs. Gandhi, who had been killed. Around the early afternoon, via BBC and Radio Pakistan, some people confirmed the rumors as true. The invincible lady was indeed gone. One of my classmates inferred, with more than a little alarm in his voice, that this meant “that no one was safe anymore.”
At the time, the fact that the assassins were two Sikh bodyguards was not seen by anyone taking part in our animated conversation as something significant. In fact, many were inclined to think that the famed “foreign hand”, that Mrs. Gandhi had publicly dreaded all her life, might have been at work. In other words, the assassination may have been masterminded by some powerful CIA operatives. (Was it that far-fetched for us to think thus? I don’t know. As someone once said “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Is there evidence to suggest a CIA involvement? I haven’t done the research to have any opinion on the matter, but what if it were true? Would the mobs unleashed by the Congress on the evening of the day of the assassination have dared to direct their “spontaneous fury” by dragging out the employees at the US embassy in Chanakyapuri, intercepting every diplomatic vehicle with a white person sitting inside, dragging them out and ringing them with burning car tyres? There are certain lines that cowardly violence never dares to cross.)
Classes were adjourned soon after mid-day. I, along with a few friends, had to wait long at the bus-stop in front of Hindu College before getting a bus which was not already full. Everyone had begun to make their way out of the university. The buses were packed and people were anxious to know the exact truth. Mid-day newspapers and supplements reported “Mrs. Gandhi shot”. The gap between that and a headline like “Mrs. Gandhi shot dead” (which most newspapers reserved for the morrow) was immeasurable in most people’s minds. People were glued to transistors, and for once, not to know the cricket score. I can still recall the look of sheer disbelief on people’s faces when the news was confirmed on the radio later in the day.
At this time of the day, in mid-afternoon on October 31, it was impossible even for those with a sharp horse sense to be able to foretell the violence that was to overtake the city by the same night. Had the violence been entirely “spontaneous”, as many Congress leaders at the time claimed, shouldn’t it have erupted as soon as the news of the assassination had been made public in the afternoon? Rajiv Gandhi, in defence of his party-men, made the infamous statement sometime after the pogrom that “when a big tree falls, the earth shakes.” Well, it was quite obvious to anyone who lived through that autumn day in Delhi that the earth took its own time to begin shaking, which makes it more than likely that a number of smaller trees conspired to shake it; many hours after the big one had fallen.
The people one saw in the buses and on the streets was shaken, grieving and mournful. They were certainly not violent. On the contrary I distinctly remember many people, young and old, expressing sadness at the fact that Indira Gandhi became a victim of her own machinations in Punjab.
It was quite late in the evening (at around 9 pm), when we sensed the first signs of the violence to come. My friends were dropping me to the bus-stop near the Delhi Zoo. On way we heard a bunch of young men shouting aggressive, communal slogans such as “let no Sikh be spared”, “throw the Sardars out”, “khoon ka badla khoon se lenge” (“we shall avenge blood with blood”). This was the first time that one could sense that Sikhs may be seriously vulnerable in the wake of the assassination. Now, many hours after the event, the tension around the city was quite palpable. Fear was writ large on people’s faces.
I lived with my parents in New Friends Colony, in South Delhi, at that time. The journey home from Kaka Nagar, where my friend lived, was a short one, perhaps only 20 minutes. But they stretch long in my memory. Commuters in the bus were silent with expectation. One could see some vehicles burning on Mathura Road, the main artery in that part of the city. Small groups of thugs armed with lathis, chains, rods and other street weaponry, were stopping passing vehicles and peeping inside, looking for Sikhs. At the Ashram bus stop I heard voices reaching into our packed bus from the open windows, asking whether there was a Sikh on the bus. I held my breath, holding on to the rails at the back of the bus with my sweaty palms. Without exception, everyone (including myself) who spoke in that moment shouted immediately, and without looking around, that there weren’t any. Later, when the bus moved again, I looked ahead to see if there was a turban visible in our bus. There were a few, hiding themselves below the level of the windows, protected by people around them. And I am sure I saw several women in Salwaar-Kameezes, who were most likely Sikhs.
I held my breath, since there were still a number of stops before the bus reached Okhla, its terminus. My own stop in Bharat Nagar, one of the many hamlets which had now given way to a posh South Delhi colony, was a few stops before Okhla. Fortunately, the bus driver was a sharp and decent fellow and decided that he was not going to allow any trouble on his bus, certainly a rare exception in Delhi. So he shouted before every stop, asking if there were any passengers who wished to get off. If there weren’t any, he would simply speed past the stop (this being an hour when there was almost no one trying to get on to the bus). If there were, he would drop them at a safe distance after the stop, eluding the possible crowd of thugs waiting near each stop.
My parents were relieved to see me back home. The news of widespread violence from around the city was confirmed by a variety of people who called us that night. The fact that the violence was directed solely at Sikhs could not be confirmed at that time by anyone. But the fact that they were certainly among the targeted group was emerging clearly. There was, in addition, a general sense of dread, that anything may happen as a consequence of the assassination, that all law and order may break down and chaos may engulf the city. In short, lacking better knowledge, most people were quite confused as to what was really going on, a soil ripe for rumors to grow in.
Rumors and credulity in a climate of fear
And there certainly were rumors at the time, hard to verify. One heard that Sikhs had been seen distributing sweets after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination. Another story that did the rounds the next day was that that the water supply in various parts of the city had been poisoned by the Sikhs. The most incredible story of all, taking old people’s slumbering collective memory back to partition days in 1947, was that trainloads of dead Hindus had been arriving at railway stations in Delhi!
The story that sent shivers down all our spines was that Sikhs, armed with Kripans (swords), were gathering in their thousands in the Balasaheb Gurudwara in Nizamuddin to forge an attack on Hindus in the area! In the mood that prevailed in those tense hours on the morning of November 1, the story sounded credible especially since we knew that so many Sikh houses in the vicinity had been looted and burnt. It was somehow easy for most people to imagine hot-blooded Sikh youth wreaking revenge on Hindus after having suffered the first blows.
All these later proved to be baseless claims, meant for an entirely different purpose altogether. Nonetheless, the rumors served their aim, in that they succeeded in whipping up considerable Anti-Sikh feeling in our locality, even amongst so-called educated people. I did not see any Sikh distributing sweets to celebrate Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination or dead bodies of Hindus arriving in Delhi in trains. Nor did I meet anyone who had personally seen such things. Whosoever talked about such happenings had only heard about such incidents from others. Water everywhere was safely being drunk. And yet, practically everyone was talking about such events as having actually happened, basing their expectations and actions on them.
What amaze me from this distance in time is just how much people at the time—young and old, men or women, educated or otherwise—was willing to take what they heard from others at face value without much skepticism or investigation! There was little exercise of patience in the formation of impressions and opinions about events to which there were no witnesses at hand. Some conclusion had to be drawn. There was a despairing haste about it which still disturbs me. Those few voices who counseled a ‘wait, watch, find out and then act’ approach were hushed down by the sheer number of those who claimed to ‘know’ what had been happening and wanted to ‘do something about it’.
In the following days, when the true stories began to emerge from different parts of the city, it became clear how masses of people had been misled by a handful for quite deadly purposes.
What the senses found difficult to believe
The night of October 31 was a tense one and it was hard to sleep in peace. The sight that greeted me, when I woke up the next morning and opened the door to the terrace, is so clear in my recollection that it could have happened yesterday. The day was clear and the sun was up, but there were many places on the horizon and some much nearer than the horizon, from where streams of black smoke were billowing up to darken the sky. One could hear from not so far away the jubilant choruses from the various mobs which seemed to be indulging in the arson.
I dressed and went out into the street in the direction of the spot which seemed to be the nearest source of the smoke. It was a big house in our block that belonged to a Sikh family. It was in flames and a mob was busy dousing what remained of it in kerosene oil. There were several hundred people—mostly young men and boys—egging each other on as they shouted “Maaro! Jalaao! Koi Sardar bachne na paye! Indira Gandhi ki Jai!” (“Kill! Burn! Let no Sikh be spared! Long live Indira Gandhi!”) Even as my heart was kicking in my chest I tried to be brave and told some of them to stop, trying to reason them out of the madness. I got my shirt torn in the process, even as I was told by a lad that nothing would happen to me or my family (the reason for which I was to find out only later). There were street urchins—boys no more than ten or twelve—carting away kitchen gadgets, the stereo, the TV, the VCR, all kinds of furniture and rugs, jubilant with their booty.
My first impression was that the underclass had taken the opportunity of the breakdown of law and order to unleash their anger at the affluent classes. It was only a bit later that I realized that I had been projecting my own rudimentary understanding of Indian sociology to make sense of what was going on. Not that there was no class dimension to the mob behavior we were witnessing. But it was, at best subliminal. For, after all, only Sikh homes were being targeted. The mob had passed by our own home, for instance, without even so much as a glance of any kind of interest. That the leaders and organizers of the mobs might have channeled the class anger of the underprivileged to achieve their nefarious end was of course still a tenable hypothesis. (This was done most effectively in Gujarat a few years ago.)
The streets were empty except for a few motorcycles that were running back and forth. The men on them seemed to be ferrying the oil to the people doing the arsoning. I then noticed that the pillion riders on at least two bikes had sheets of paper in their hands.
When they stopped I looked over someone’s shoulder that they were holding in their hands a list of houses to be burnt! The list had the house number and the name of the head of the household, usually a ‘Singh’. That was the first time that it occurred to me that the rioting was well-organized, that a political party may be behind it. How had the arsonists managed to get this information? Did they have access to ration cards? Phone numbers? Investigations done after the pogrom revealed that Congress (I) leaders had supplied mob leaders not just with money, weapons, transport and oil, but also with ration and voter lists issued by the government.
On more than a few occasions we saw auto-rickshaws arriving with several tins of kerosene oil and other inflammable material such as gunny sacks. Vehicles and houses of Sikhs were being burnt amidst yells and shouts all around. A story we heard was that in one house an old gentleman in a wheel-chair had been pushed into the cauldron from the second floor of his house. Later it turned out to be a rumor.
I walked down the road opposite my house towards Bharat Nagar (a cluster of shops, and houses where mostly milkmen, vendors and auto-rickshaw drivers resided). At the end of the road was a burning DTC bus (Route No.403), which had allegedly belonged to a Sikh and was thus being burnt. There were several other vehicles, scooter rickshaws, taxis and private cars, which were burning along the main cross road known as Eastern Avenue.
There were at least two large mobs, of about 500-600 people each, armed with sticks, lathis, stones and rubble. They were going around New Friends Colony and Maharani Bagh looting and burning the vehicles and houses of Sikhs. I alongwith a few friends, followed one of the mobs around the colony. The thing that struck us most profoundly was that the mob was not an angry one. (So the class theory was clearly untrue!) It was going about its destructive business in a calculated, in fact, celebratory manner. They seemed to be in no great hurry (the cops, we were to discover later, were on holiday after all, a fact that the arsonists must have known all along). “At last the Sikhs were being taught a lesson” and “everyone” was to contribute to this terrible ritual of public justice, we were told.
Many houses—35 if I remember correctly, and all belonging to Sikhs—were burnt in New Friends Colony alone. Typically the mob would first look for the occupants of the house (most of them had escaped in time), empty it of all belongings, throw gunny sacks doused in kerosene over the house and set them on fire. If there was a car in the driveway it received similar treatment.
It was clear that only Sikh houses in our locality had been targeted. In some cases, the nameplates outside some houses had been removed, to avoid detection by the mobs. Often, this very fact made it a target of the violence and the arson. Servants were frequently interrogated because the residents of the houses were not present. The servants often tried to save the houses by concealing the identity of the owners. When the leaders of the mob felt convinced that they were being lied to, the houses were attacked. So far as I know, they did not make a mistake. In other words, they did not burn any houses belonging to Hindus, even if some of the Sikh houses that went undetected were left alone, one right in front of our house, their servants having successfully convinced the leaders of the mob that their bosses were not Sikh. The latter were smuggled away into a neighbor’s house early during the day.
