The Kaurs of 1984 by Sanam Sutirath Wazir, published by HarperCollins, explores the stories and perspectives of Sikh women around the events in 1984, including Operation Blue Star and the anti-Sikh violence. An excerpt from the book follows.
The next morning, on 1 November, she woke up to finish her household chores so that she could leave on time for the function at her brother’s home. At around 10 a.m., she stepped out for a moment to buy a box of matches from the grocery shop down the road.
It was then that she saw the men standing in oddly menacing-looking groups across the road. They were all dressed in white kurta-pyjamas and were armed with lathis, iron rods and other weapons.
‘I was terrified. I first thought that maybe it was some kind of a gang war, the way they show in films.’
As she stood there, however, she realized that these men were not actually strangers. They were her neighbours! Then, she became aware of the police presence in the neighbourhood. She heard one of the policemen demanding of the group, ‘Why are you standing here? Are you afraid of the Sikhs? Just go and kill all the Sardars.’
As she phrased it in her conversation with me, ‘… the earth around me shook.’
Petrified, Darshan turned and began running back towards her house. She fell twice on the uneven road, breaking the strap of one of her chappals as she did so. Hampered by the broken strap, she kicked off her chappals and began running barefoot. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the men had entered her colony and were coming directly towards Block 32.
Sanam Sutirath Wazir
The Kaurs of 1984
HarperCollins India, 2024
Breathless and frightened, Darshan barged into her house, calling for her mother-in-law. She told the older woman everything that she had seen and heard, and both of them ran to the rooftop. Spirals of smoke were already visible at a distance—a gurdwara nearby was on fire. They looked down towards the end of their narrow lane and saw that the mob had managed to lay its hands on a middle-aged Sikh man and was beating him with lathis. Panicking, Darshan’s mother-in-law told her to go back downstairs and ask her husband to hide. The main door to their house was not to be opened at any cost. ‘My brother-in-law was not at home. He had gone out to buy groceries,’ Darshan remembered, tears filling her eyes as she narrated the story. ‘But my mother-in-law was so scared about what might happen to him that she went out to find him. She looked for him everywhere, but she just couldn’t find him. By the time she came back home, she was gasping for breath. She asked all the women and children of the house to come and sit outside, thinking perhaps that we could prevent the mob from entering our homes if we did so.’
Her mother-in-law then rubbed mud on Darshan’s face and covered her head with a dupatta. When Darshan tried to stop her from doing so, her mother-in-law shot back roughly, ‘Randi, yeh haramzaade le jayenge tujhe! Whore, these bastards will take you away!’ No sooner had she finished rubbing the mud on Darshan’s face, than a group of four to five men reached their doorstep. They were looking for Darshan’s husband. Darshan recognized a local leader, Rampal Saroj, among the men. He demanded, ‘Where is Ram Singh?’
‘I told him that I didn’t know anything apart from the fact that he had gone out with his brother,’ said Darshan.
Saroj assured Darshan that Ram Singh would not be hurt. If anything, Saroj said, he was there to protect Ram Singh rather than harm him. But Darshan refused to budge. Rampal Saroj left then, but he returned a few minutes later with a group of almost fifteen people. The men overpowered Darshan and her mother-in-law and broke open the main door of their house. They found her husband hiding in the kitchen and dragged him out by his hair. They placed a quilt and a tyre over his head, doused him in oil and then set him ablaze. Ram Singh was nearly burnt to death; he later succumbed to his injuries.
Tears now pouring out of her eyes, Darshan continued, ‘I saw my husband crying and begging for help, but the mob was merciless. They never allowed us to help. I watched him die.’
Darshan believes that this was a mob that did not want to simply murder the Sikhs. ‘They also wanted us to witness it all in order to brutalize and scar us forever.’
But this was not the end of their trauma. Right outside her house, Darshan saw her brother-in-law running for his life while a mob of attackers pursued him with swords and sticks. In the ensuing scuffle, he was left bleeding on the ground, his stomach cut open. Desperate and not knowing what else to do, Darshan and her mother-in-law tied their dupattas around his open stomach.
She recalled him begging for water, but there was no water to give him. Her mother-in-law sat numbly beside her son, staring at the sky; the brightness of the sun at such a dark hour was too much for her to bear. Around her lay the bodies of her sons—one burnt to death and the other dying by degrees. Darshan tried to speak to her, and almost as though she was galvanized by the sound of her voice, her mother-in-law began hitting her stomach and tearing at her hair. ‘She was absolutely devastated.’
In the winter of 1984, Trilokpuri became a burial ground, the air rent by smoke and inhuman screams. ‘The mob did not even spare the dead,’ Darshan told me. ‘They removed gold rings and chains from the dead bodies. They were not scared of the law.’ It was as if the mob had been clearly instructed and perhaps even given some kind of training in what to do before the massacre. In the midst of this chaos, women were forced out of their homes by the attackers who wanted to prevent them from giving any assistance to their male kith and kin; most of those who were milling around on the streets were women. Those who tried to intervene and save their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers were attacked brutally by the marauding mob. Darshan heard Rampal Saroj instigating the mob, shouting, ‘No one should be spared!’ She was not spared either. The mob dragged her down the road before pushing her to the ground. During this ordeal, she was separated from her twenty-day-old son, while her eldest son, a toddler of four, was attacked by arsonists with an iron rod; her son still bears a visible mark of the attack. When she pleaded with her attackers to spare her son, they called him the child of a snake.
At about 4 p.m., after the mob had murdered all the Sikh men they could get hold of in Block 32, they instructed all the women seated outside their homes. ‘Now your men are dead. Come out and sit together in the park nearby Block 32.’ The women came out and all huddled together. The mobsters offered them some water, but no one drank it. Then the men began dragging off whichever girl caught their fancy. ‘Each girl was taken by a gang of some ten or twelve men. Many of these girls were in their teens. They would be taken to nearby shelters, raped and then sent back after a few hours,’ Darshan recalled. ‘The men were monsters. They also raped women who were of their mother’s and grandmother’s ages.’
Some girls never came back, and those who did were in a pitiable condition, naked and bruised. Darshan recalled how a young girl of about fifteen came back sobbing—she had been raped multiple times by men as old as her grandfather. Guddi (name changed), a woman in her late fifties, was raped in front of all the other women. Darshan remembered the scene with painful clarity, ‘She was crying throughout, but the monsters did not stop. They took turns on her. Men as young as seventeen raped her. When they left, she was lying on the ground, naked like a newborn. The women in the park covered her with sheets. These rapists were not bothered about anything. After all, they had unsaid police permissions.’ Darshan added, ‘The leaders of the Congress Party were coming and dragging women to nearby houses too.’
In less than two hours, there were 275 widows across 180 homes. In an area less than 1,000 sq. yards, hundreds of limbless bodies were scattered about. Worse was the fact that none of them knew why this was happening in the first place. All the women were sitting numbly when they heard the mob shouting, ‘Netaji aa gaye hain! Our leader has come!’ Darshan pushed through the women and saw Congress leader H.K.L. Bhagat stepping down from his gleaming white Ambassador. He was clad in a white kurta-pyjama, with dark sunglasses over his eyes. He received a warm welcome from the same men who had been murdering and raping the Sikh inhabitants of Block 32 only a short while ago.
‘I thought he was there to save us. But when he stepped down from his white car, he told the crowd that Indira Gandhi was their mother and these Sikhs had killed their mother,’ said Darshan.
She told me that she heard H.K.L. Bhagat saying, ‘Whatever you need—chemicals, kerosene, petrol or anything—I will give to you. Not a single child of these Sardars should survive. They have killed our mother, Indira Gandhi.’
That was the first time that Darshan realized that Indira Gandhi was dead.
‘I felt my grandmother’s pain at that time. She walked from Pakistan to India, searching for a place she could call home. She thought she would be safe in India. But are we? We were no less than refugees in our own country. We were abandoned. We never mattered.’
Sanam Sutirath Wazir, an advocate for human rights from Jammu and Kashmir, is engaged in documenting historical injustices and large-scale violence through oral history.
