Riots and a culture of wilful amnesia
1984 debased the nation by allowing collective acceptance of impunity to prevail, which contributed to the outcome of 2014
by Salil Tripathi
Thirty years have passed, but the wounds are fresh, festering and smouldering, and no balm can soothe the pain. The ghastly massacre of Sikhs that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi three decades ago remains a continuing reminder of India’s appalling culture of impunity. The lack of accountability has hardened perceptions, and divisive views persist beneath the calm surface. When he was an editor at The Indian Express, Arun Shourie wrote after a particularly deadly carnage in Punjab: “We divide our dead now”, pointing out the growing chasm between Hindus and Sikhs. Now memories remain divided, as facts are recalled selectively, interpreted differently, and there is no middle ground.
On the eve of the 30th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the brutal massacres of Sikhs that followed, the Chandigarh Literature Festival organized a panel discussion on the 30th anniversary of Operation Bluestar. It is not possible to talk about Bluestar without talking about what preceded and what followed. To some in Chandigarh that evening, the military operation should never have happened, regardless of the Khalistani militants converting the Golden Temple into a fortress; to others, the military operation was the only option left precisely because the terrorists who had taken over the complex had already desecrated the temple.
Three decades later, we aren’t any closer to a closure. The pogrom of Sikhs remains one of the most shameful episodes of post-independence history. But after that, the agreements disappear. Was Indira Gandhi’s assassination an appropriate response because she had instructed the army to attack the Golden Temple? Was the army over-confident, incompetent, or deliberately insensitive when it stormed the complex on a day of religious significance for Sikhs? Could the terrorists have been starved into submission instead? Was Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale a threat to national unity, or was he a leader of Sikh freedom fighters? Since when did a struggle for greater autonomy for Sikhs mean singling out non-Sikh passengers in buses and killing them? Did it matter that Bhindranwale was a creation of the Congress itself, which had hoped to divide the Sikh vote to prevent the Akali Dal from coming to power in Punjab? These questions are endless, unanswered; the deeper you dig, the harder it becomes to get a diverse group of people to agree to any single interpretation. When someone offers an interpretation that’s between extreme positions, as journalist and my former editor Rahul Singh did that evening, someone else gets up, interrupting him, saying—that was not how it was, at all; not at all. It is like a rerun of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, Rashomon, where different people offer different narratives of what happened, how, and why, and reality continues to elude.
The impunity that followed the massacres of Sikhs was disgusting. I was a student abroad those years, but I read accounts of journalists such as Rahul Bedi (who would later be my colleague for some time at the Indian Post), and activist-writers such as Dilip Simeon, and more formally, the indictment of the state machinery in Who Are The Guilty? It was a report People’s Union for Civil Liberties and People’s Union for Democratic Rights had put together, which named names.
I returned to India after my graduation in 1986, and the writer Harji Malik took me to see the resilience of Sikh widows in places such as Trilokpuri. I wrote about that stain on the nation; I also wrote about the rise of the Hindu nationalist activism in Punjab. Meanwhile, the sophistry of successive commissions of inquiry widened the chasm between the Congress leadership and the foot soldiers who had carried out the carnage, so that the little people got picked up. Prominent Congress politicians acted as if they were immune. They remained active in politics, becoming parliamentarians and taking ministerial positions. Amitav Ghosh would rail against impunity in an essay, to no avail.
Thirty years passed; justice remained elusive. Of those 30 years, the Congress ruled for 20. By disregarding justice, by severely weakening accountability, and by failing to reassure the victims that the Indian state would support them and not those who had perpetrated the crimes, India has allowed resentment to simmer. The massacres of 1984 were not the first—there has been no accountability over the violence during the Partition of 1947 either. Nor were the 1984 massacres the last—think of Gujarat, of 2002, of the Godhra train burning in which 59 people died, and the retaliatory violence by Hindu mobs against Muslims in which nearly 1,000 people were killed.
Many reasons explain Narendra Modi’s rise in Indian politics: corruption charges against the Congress, its ineffective leadership, its listless campaigning, anti-incumbency mood across the nation, the perception that Modi’s record in Gujarat was brilliant and that it could be replicated across the country, and his remarkably disciplined campaigning. But we must not forget how 1984 debased the nation, by allowing wilful amnesia and collective acceptance of impunity to prevail, which contributed to the outcome of 2014.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.
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