Today, October 31, is the 40-year anniversary of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister of India, and the subsequent massacre of Sikhs in various parts of India.
Anniversaries can be difficult affairs. Forty years on from 1984 – the date itself is shorthand for the trauma of an entire community that needs no explanation – we live with the continuing betrayal of the thousands of Sikhs who lost everything in the orgy of violence that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards, two men tasked with protecting, not killing her.
Yet, one betrayal does not justify another.
In the words of the only prime minister to have attempted any sort of apology for the violence that overtook the Sikh community in large swathes of north India, particularly Delhi, “what took place in 1984 is the negation of the concept of nationhood enshrined in our constitution.” Note that even Dr Manmohan Singh, who we now know was threatened by the same mob dynamics that obliterated so many lives, was not able to put a label on “what took place in 1984”: 40 years on we are yet to agree on whether the brutal violence directed at Sikhs was a massacre, a pogrom, or an attempt at genocide. (Whatever it was, it was not a riot, which implies two sides clashing.)
How can you properly apologise for that which you cannot name?
Of course, October brings with it two anniversaries.
One, a defined act of violence and betrayal, bound in time and space to the moment when Indira Gandhi was gunned down at close range by her two bodyguards at her residence on the morning of October 31, 1984.
The second act of violence and betrayal started when she was declared dead. It radiated from her residence to parts of Delhi most susceptible to communal mob dynamics, and from there, to some other states. (To some states, but not all.) Starting with ‘khoon ka badla khoon (avenge blood with blood)’, it swept through localities. Sikhs were hunted down – the men and boys pulled out of their homes and killed, often after being doused with kerosine and then set alight in front of their remaining family. Homes were looted and then burnt down. Sikh businesses were targeted, sometimes in busy markets where adjoining establishments were not touched because they did not belong to Sikhs. Gurudwaras and schools were attacked. And all the while, the organs of state that were meant to protect the citizens of India stood by idly, or worse. Khoon ka badla khoon.
In the absence of definite figures, we do not even know for certain how much blood was spilled just after October 31. There is no definite data on the victims, no redressal or compensation, and vitally, no justice in the form of punishment of those who killed, maimed, raped, looted, incited and facilitated. This act of violence and betrayal has no end point or closure.
Sikhs as a whole are not given to public lamentations and demonstrations of victimhood. It should not need repeating that many of this community lost everything when their homeland was divided in 1947. They rebuilt their lives, letting go of the past in the tacit understanding that their future lay in secular India. Thirty-seven years later – and after almost a decade of tumultuous politics in Punjab that exploited that very loss of heritage and home – many found that their faith in the state had been naïve. Silence on these matters is not indifference or amnesia.
If I needed any reminding, it was provided last month, on the death anniversary of my grandfather. As in recent years, his children and grandchildren remembered him on a family WhatsApp group. It was all fairly normal – our usual reaching out in memory of someone who died far too young, in 1983. Until my aunt typed, ‘Thankfully [he] didn’t have to live through the carnage of the Sikhs in 1984.’
1984, the date that says it all.
It was as if a dam had been breached in our collective memories. The stories are painful, and sadly, all too common – we have heard many versions of them. These happened to my family, and the smell of fear came through my screen 40 years later. We knew then, as we know now that the violence was not some spontaneous outpouring of grief that turned violent. It was targeted. That much was clear even by mid-November when the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and the People’s Union for Democratic Rights published the conclusions of their fact-finding missions that examined the violence between November 1 and 10 in a slim pamphlet titled Who are the Guilty. Four decades later, it still makes for devastating reading.
And of course, the violence did not end in November. The fires spread to Punjab and continued to spark and smoulder for another decade. We are arguably still witnessing the fallout of those funeral pyres as suggested by developments in relations with Canada. And while Punjab burnt, every Sikh man was a potential terrorist. Checkpoints, airport check-ins, trains, any public place: if you wore a turban, or were with someone wearing a turban, these places were to be navigated with care.
1984 was not an event: it is an open, suppurating wound. This wound will continue to fester as long as justice is not delivered to the victims. We are well past apologies now. Qualified apologies have been delivered, but without concrete action they remain empty words. Inquiries, eye witness accounts, testimonies, NGO reports and others provide a wealth of evidence to start the wheels of justice rolling – if there is the political will to seek meaningful justice. Testimony from the survivors have named locals, corporators, councillors, MPs, police, bureaucrats and ministers. And yet the Indian state has displayed a strange reticence in following the testimony to its logical conclusion. In the interim, governments have changed at the centre and in the affected states. And yet, even those who were in opposition when the killings took place now appear to show an indifference to the suffering that they decried at the time. Is it because it is politically expedient to keep those wounds fresh, to pick at them, come election time?
If this anniversary is to mean anything other than shame, it is time for concrete action. There has been 40 years of obfuscation, indifference, and then, to add insult to injury, exhortations to move on. Can we really expect the women of the ‘widow’s colony’ (its very existence should be an affront to our nation) to move on when their past, present and future went up in diesel-fed flames four decades ago, and when, in those four decades, nothing has been done to address their immeasurable loss? These are women whose male family members were claimed by the mob. Records from the time indicate that those seeking shelter in Tilak Vihar in 1984 were families of women with young children. There was not a single boy over 10. There was not a single earning male left, and any means of livelihood was probably reduced to ashes – that is, if they could bear to return to the place where their neighbours had turned on them. The women of Tilak Vihar are still waiting for justice. And it seems we are comfortable ignoring their grief.
We need to acknowledge what happened in October and November 1984. We need to confront the violence that was visited on the Sikhs, and to name it. We need figures and data on how many people were affected. The fact that we do not have any definite data on those killed or injured, on properties and possessions burnt or looted, on citizens displaced, helps our collective inability to name the violence. We have elided the nature of the violence by hiding behind generalities and estimates.
We also need to take a hard look at how the violence spread so quickly. Yes, of course, it was sponsored and encouraged, and the diesel that fed the flames came from somewhere, as did the buses that brought in mobs, or the rods and crude weapons that were handed out. But, people do not wake up one morning deciding to turn on their neighbours. The seeds of communal hatred had been cultivated while insurgency and secessionism grew in Punjab, culminating in Operation Bluestar. Once a community is painted as a problem, once their loyalties to the state are questioned, even briefly, it takes very little for communal flames to roar into life.
The beast of communalism lurks within us still. It was nourished in the butchery of 1947, and fed again in 1983, 2002, 2008, 2013, 2020. It lies in wait for the next spark. It is time to confront the beast. The pogrom of 1984 would be a good place to start.
Priyanjali Malik is an independent researcher.
