The narration about the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 that happened in the national Capital immediately after the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had taken a new turn on December 4, Wednesday, with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh charging PV Narasimha Rao, the then Home Minister, responsible for the pogrom which claimed the lives of more than 3,000 Sikhs.
While addressing a meeting organised in New Delhi, Manmohan Singh said that Rao failed to summon the Army to put an end to the riots and this was the reason for the murder and mayhem of thousands of innocent Sikhs in Delhi as a retaliation for the assassination of Indira Gandhi by two members of her security wing, both of whom belonging to the Sikh community.
“When the sad event of 1984 took place, Gujaral Ji on that same sad evening went to the then Home Minister P V Narasimha Rao, and said to him that the situation is so grave that it is necessary for the government to call the army at the earliest. If that advice would have been heeded , perhaps the massacre that took place in 1984 could have been avoided,” Singh is quoted as saying.
Though Gujral lived up to November 30, 2012 ( 28 years, to be precise), he has not uttered anywhere about the meeting he had with Rao and his request to summon the army to prevent the anti-Sikh riots. Gujral has not mentioned anywhere about the meeting between him and Rao as alleged by Singh.
Interestingly, in his widely read autobiography “Matter of Discretion”, published in 2011, Gujral has written a lot about Narasimha Rao and his tenure as Foreign Minister in the Cabinet of Indira Gandhi. But in the chapter dealing with the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Gujral has indirectly blamed Rajiv Gandhi for the anti-Sikh riots that shook the conscience of humanity.
“To this day, I don’t know for certain under what circumstances and on whose advice she had first imposed internal emergency in June 1975 and later let the Bhindranwale crisis fester, ending in the fateful Operation Blusestar! These two decisions had blotted her otherwise fair name and bright era. The misfortune did not end with her death. The era of her son Rajiv Gandhi began ominously with the torrent of anti-Sikh riots , which continue to haunt the nation to this day,” writes Gujral in Chapter 32 (Indira Gandhi’s Assassination-page 246).
After going through the book, one gets the impression that Gujral had no love lost for Rao. He describes that Narasimha Rao’s emergence as Prime Minister was pure accident.
“Nobody ever expected it. Not even he himself! In fact even before the general elections were announced, after the fall of Chandrasekhar’s Government, Rao had decided to retire from public life.
His decision was motivated by the fact that his influence in the Congress Party had declined to such an extent that he was not even considered for membership of Parliament. It was indeed callous how an extremely capable leader and a scholar to boot who had spent all his life in politics was so contemptuously discarded by the powers that be, as if he had never existed”, says Gujral (Page 344-345 Chapter 49).
The question being asked is if Gujaral could be so open minded about Rao and G K Moopanar (whose Prime Ministerial dreams immediately after the 1996 elections were demolished by none other than the latter’s acolyte P Chidambaram and DMK leader M Karunanidhi), why the diplomat-turned-politician should hide this incident from the general public? The answer is Manmohan Singh has lost some links somewhere in this discourse.