In 1984, 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi just because Indira Gandhi's assassins were their coreligionists. Thirty years later, they await justice
In the land where Orwell was born,” writes Jaspreet Singh in his recent book, Helium, “1984 was never imaginary. In India, it was real.” And it was real in a most violent, revolting manner. For, that was the year which saw 3,000 Sikhs being massacred in Delhi just because the two assassins of Indira Gandhi were their coreligionists. Unfortunately, as we observe the 30th anniversary of this ghastly act, there’s complete silence about the pogrom. Till date no political leader has been convicted of the killings, and no one in the administration has been held accountable! This was a crime which no one committed! No one killed the Sikhs in Delhi!
Helium tells the story of Dr Raj Kumar, a chemical engineer much like the author, who returns to India after more than two decades abroad. For the protagonist, Delhi is filled with dreadful memories of ’84, particularly the killing of the professor he studied under. Kumar recalls the horror he witnessed at the Delhi railway station: “Stop it, I say, ‘you can’t do this, he is our teacher.’ ‘Khoon ka badla khoon say... saale Sardar ki aulad... gadar ki aulad.’ Although it is early morning, his breath stinks of rum... I urge the cops to help, I tell them that I happen to be the son of a senior police officer. At this point, the chief lumpen laughs and spits in Prof Singh’s face, douses the tyre with more hydrocarbons and strikes a match. A senior Congress leader, his Nehru-Gandhi khadi clothes fluttering in the wind, is standing close to the station master’s office on the platform, guiding the mob like the conductor of a big orchestra... He is not very tall and wears black glasses. I will never forget that Congress-wallah’s black glasses.”
Kumar was a helpless bystander. He could not use his knowledge of chemistry to extinguish the flames swallowing up the body of the professor. “How fast they engulfed his entire body. I could do nothing. I was a mere onlooker. In the end all that remained along with the ashes were a few bones and a steel bracelet.” As he was coming back from the station, he saw a dozen of Sikh bodies on fire. Smell of “burning wool, rubber tyres and human flesh” was everywhere.
For three days since October 31, police looked the other way as Sikh families were marked, picked, raped and killed. Rioting started from the AIIMS where Mrs Gandhi was declared dead. Joseph Maliakan, then The Indian Express reporter, noticed that though Additional Commissioner of Police Gautam Kaul was standing outside the hospital with a large number of cops, he did nothing to curb the violence. Asked why he did not intervene, and he said that “he could do nothing”. Worse, when some policemen tried to act, they were declared unfit for the duty! The Sabzi Mandi Police Station, for instance, registered the first case of anti-Sikh violence that day, primarily because it was headed by a Sikh, but he along with his superior, another Sikh, were pulled out of action the same night. Ashok Jaitley, former Chief Secretary, Jammu & Kashmir, exposed the complicity of the administration when he mentioned, in his affidavit before the Misra Commission, about a police officer standing near Safdarjang Road. “Don’t worry. They are only after Sardars,” the officer told Jaitley when he complained about a gang of youths stoning cars.
But why just policeIJ Even the two most prominent newspapers of Delhi chose to look the other way when Sikhs were being massacred in the broad daylight. It fell on a few upright editors like Arun Shourie to objectively bring out the mayhem being orchestrated on the streets of Delhi. Very few then questioned how HKl Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler, two of the main accused, could become Cabinet ministers in the Rajiv Gandhi Government. Bhagat died in 2005 without being convicted, and the cases against Tytler were closed after the investigating agency stated that the witnesses were either dead or unwilling to testify after so many years of the incident!
Today, when the media and the ‘liberal’ intelligentsia never miss an opportunity to take a potshot at Narendra Modi for his failure to protect a minority community in 2002, they need to answer why they failed to blame Rajiv Gandhi for the 1984 pogrom. Not even when he likened the killings to the reverberations caused by the impact of a fallen tree: “When a mighty tree falls, it is natural that the earth around it does shake a little.” In fact, to rub salt to the wound of the victims, Rajiv later commended the mobs for ending the bloodshed as they did in three days or so! Considering that in Delhi the police are under the control of the Union Government, Rajiv Gandhi should have been the fall guy. But then Rajiv was ‘secular’. And, in the Nehruvian secular worldview, a ‘secular’ killing is acceptable to a ‘communal’ killing — just as Muslim communalism is preferable to Hindu communalism.
Today, 30 years later, justice is still being denied to the Sikhs of Delhi. Jaspreet Singh Helium eloquently — and with a lot of sensitivity — tells us this saga of hatred, betrayal and killings. Read it. It will make you angry. It will make you think.