Author: Arvind Lavakare
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: June 22, 2004
URL: http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/22arvind.htm
While our media was helped by A
B Vajpayee in Manali to raise the Gujarat ghost of 2002, Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh resurrected another, but forgotten, ghost: the anti-Sikh
riots of 1984. When he visited a gurdwara in Delhi the other day, he prayed
that the two events would never happen again.
All of us pray for the same, wishing
to let the past be. But our English-language press is not content with
that; pouncing on Vajpayee suddenly pointing a finger of guilt at Modi,
the press is eager to rub the Gujarat salt into the BJP's lesion of Election
2004.
Has the Congress atoned for the
Sikh carnage of 1984 by installing a Sikh as prime minister? Or has it
atoned by making Jagdish Tytler, the same man who was among several Congressmen
suspected of having had a hand in that carnage, a minister of state?
The 20th anniversary of that event
is occasion enough to juxtapose the two ghosts. Since readers in India
and abroad have, for over two years, been flooded with all kinds of detail
about it from a large spectrum of writers, Gujarat 2002 is best left summarised
as below.
Gujarat 2002 riots
Provocation: On the morning of February
27, at Godhra station, 58 Hindu passengers returning from a pilgrimage
to Lord Ram's Ayodhya were scorched alive by a Muslim mob.
Retaliation: While nothing much
happened on February 27 itself, a mass vendetta commenced on February 28.
For two days thereafter, Hindu groups indulged in arson and loot, raping
and killing.
Counter-retaliation: Francois Gautier,
a Delhi-based French journalist, wrote that subsequently there were 157
riots and that all of them were started by Muslim groups (India Today,
June 24, 2002).
Victims: In the three months following
the Godhra massacre, the official figure is 800 dead, of which a quarter
were Hindus. Another estimate is 1,050 dead, of which Hindus were 250.
Of the 98,000 persons sent to refugee camps, 10,000 were Hindus.
Government action: A five-man fact-finding
committee of The Council for International Affairs and Human Rights headed
by D S Tewatia, a former chief justice of the Calcutta and Punjab and Haryana
high courts, reported that:-
* By the afternoon of February 28,
it was clear that the communal violence had spread widely and the situation
had become so alarming that it was unlikely to be controlled by the police
and paramilitary forces. Hence, at 4.30 pm that day, the chief minister
announced at a press conference that the state government had decided to
call the army to assist the civil administration. And by that evening the
Union government had given instructions for the deployment of two brigades
in Gujarat.
* The Union defence minister flew
to Ahmedabad at midnight and had a meeting with the chief minister to discuss
deployment of the army. Troops needed to be withdrawn from the country's
border with Pakistan, where they were deployed in full strength in an eyeball-to-
eyeball situation.
* Within 24 hours, one brigade of
the Indian Army had landed in Ahmedabad. In a meeting at 8 am in which
the chief minister, defence minister, army generals, and civil officers
participated, the formal plan for deployment of the army was approved.
Magistrates needed to accompany the army were appointed and by 11 am on
March 1 the actual deployment of the army at sensitive points had begun.
* The second brigade was deputed
to Rajkot and Vadodara on the night of March 1.
* Columns allotted to Godhra reached
there on the morning of March 2.
* The army went back to the barracks
on March 10.
What did the Gujarat police do?
In the first 48 hours of the violence, they arrested 3,900 persons, of
whom two-thirds were Hindus (Sanjoy Banerjee, 'Indian Politics in this
Age', Indian Currents, June 2002). By April 5, 9,500 persons had been arrested,
of whom two-thirds were Hindus. 'The Gujarat police did try to restore
law and order.' (Prem Shankar Jha, 'Gujarat: A Sober Diary', Outlook, April
22, 2002.) National Minorities Commission Chairman John Joseph noted, 'As
on April 6, 126 persons were killed in police firing, of whom 77 were Hindus.'
(Kay Benedict, 'Bad PR charge on Atal, Modi', The Telegraph, April 21,
2002.) L K Advani, ex-home minister, publicly stated that the police fired
3,900 rounds of ammunition.
The National Human Rights Commission
and the Minorities Commission 'accepted the Gujarat government's contention
that it did foresee trouble and took precautionary steps to check it, but
was caught by surprise and overwhelmed by the mob fury erupting on February
28.'
The billion-dollar question: So
was Gujarat 2002 'state-sponsored' genocide against Muslims? Was it at
all genocide or a pogrom against Muslims? Or was it a case of any number
of sandbags not enough to stem the Brahmaputra floods?
Anti-Sikh Riots, 1984
Below is an account sourced almost
entirely from a report released in the House of Commons, Britain, on May
25 this year to mark the 20th anniversary of what was the darkest and most
humiliating year ever in the long, glorious history of India's Sikh community.
The report was prepared by Truth & Justice Campaign, Berkshire (London),
set up a year ago 'to bring the perpetrators of genocide to justice' (The
Asian Age, Mumbai edition, page 6, May 27, 2004).
The report (of which this writer
has a copy) is titled '1984 Sikhs' Kristallnacht', or 'Night of the Broken
Glass'. It is so named after the event of November 9, 1938, when a night
of horror was raged, apparently spontaneously, on Jews throughout Germany
to avenge the murder of a German embassy official in Paris by a 17-year-old
Jew refugee enraged by the mass expulsion of 10,000 Jews, including his
father, to Poland. Countless Jewish shops, synagogues, and homes went up
in flames, and several Jewish men, women, and children were slain while
trying to escape burning to death even as the police and the fire brigade
looked on. According to William Shirer's classic book on the Third Reich,
the destruction in broken glass alone came to five million marks.
The Truth & Justice Campaign's
report's revelations are highlighted below.
The riots: Early on November 1,
1984, hordes of people from the suburbs of Delhi descended on various localities
where the Sikh population was concentrated. They carried iron rods, knives,
clubs, and combustible material, including kerosene. They had voters' lists
of houses and business establishments belonging to the Sikhs.
Murderous gangs of 200 people or
300 people began to swarm into Sikh homes, hacking the occupants to pieces,
chopping off the heads of children, raping women, tying Sikh men to tyres
set aflame with kerosene, burning down the houses and shops after ransacking
them. Mobs stopped buses and trains, in and out of Delhi, pulling out Sikh
passengers to be lynched or doused with kerosene and burnt. An Indian Express
report of November 2 described a mob. 'Labouring at a leisurely pace, they
split open Lachman Singh's skull and pouring kerosene into the gash set
alight the half-alive man in front of Gyan Devi, his wife.' Unlike Gujarat
2002, the violence wasn't confined to one territory, but spread to 80 towns
throughout India.
The provocation: On October 31,
1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by her two Sikh
bodyguards in revenge for Operation Bluestar. This operation had started
on May 31, when 150,000 troops were sent to Punjab with tanks and all and
the entire state was sealed off from the rest of the country. On June 4,
Indira Gandhi had ordered the army to invade the Golden Temple complex
in Amritsar, the Sikhs' national institution, with the purpose of flushing
out Bhindranwale and his militants who had been demanding Khalistan as
an independent Sikh state. (The report contains gory details of Operation
Bluestar as well, but they do not concern us here.)
The retaliation: None. Sikhs in
Delhi and elsewhere just didn't put up a fight.
The victims: 'Thousands," says Truth
& Justice Campaign - all Sikhs. (The figure mentioned in India is 3,000
odd - all Sikhs.) Moreover, its subject report says, 'A reign of violence,
repression and genocide was to persist until at least 1995.'
Government action: The State-owned
and controlled Doordarshan and All India Radio broadcast provocative slogans
such as khoon ka badla khoon. Remember, there were no private television
channels then.
The rest of the Congress government's
'action' is best expressed in the following quotes:
Hardly any soldiers were to be seen
in the streets of the capital. (The Guardian, UK, November 3, 1984).
Criminally led hoodlums killed
Sikhs, looted or burnt homes and properties while the police twiddled their
thumbs. (India Today, November 15, 1984)
Many people complained that, in
some cases, the police were not merely hanging back, but giving active
support. (The Times, November 5, 1984)
The new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi,
in his maiden speech on Delhi's Boat Club lawns did not have a word to
condemn the killings; nor did he give any assurance to the Sikhs that the
killers would be punished. Instead, he merely used ugly words such as 'avenge,'
'anger,' 'revenge,' and explained away this unprecedented orgy of violence
comparing it with a natural phenomenon: 'there is a shaking of the earth
whenever a big tree falls.' (Amiya Rao, 'When Delhi Burnt', Economic and
Political Weekly, December 8, 1984.)
To Rao's above quote must be added
that of the late veteran journalist, Janardan Thakur, who in his book Prime
Ministers (Published by ESHWAR, Mumbai, 1999) wrote, 'The Prime Minister
[Rajiv Gandhi] paid no attention to the most emotive issue of the Sikhs:
the demand to punish the culprits of the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi.'
Rajiv Gandhi's inaction must be
seen in the context of the joint report on the riots by the People's Union
of Civil Liberties and the People's Union of Democratic Rights. That report
mentioned the names of 16 important Congressmen and 13 police officers
among those accused by survivors and witnesses.
The billion-dollar question: In
his article cited above, Amiya Rao says, 'The Delhi violence was well planned
and well organised. It would have burst forth even if Indira Gandhi had
been alive.' So, were the Sikh riots of 1984 in fact a Congress-sponsored
genocide and a pogrom? Should Saint Sonia's Congress atone for it by kicking
out Jagdish Tytler from the UPA ministry to start with?
