The day India killed its own - Anti - Sikh riots of 1984 (Manoj Mitta)

(Indian Express, October 31, 2004
URL : http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=58000 )

The day India killed its own
This day in 1984, a prime minister was shot and India’s most horrific religious carnage since Partition began. Manoj Mitta travels back to Delhi’s ‘Sikh riots’. To 20 years of justice denied


LAST week when the Union Cabinet granted an extension to the Justice G T Nanavati Commission conducting a re-inquiry into the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, it really had no other option. Especially since the current term of the Commission was due to lapse on November 1, the day that marked the 20th anniversary of the carnage that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The two-month extension given on the request of the Nanavati Commission is all the same ironical—for at least two reasons.

It was only the other day that the Centre had scrapped a judicial inquiry into the Tehelka controversy and, in a bid to justify it, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh alleged that the judge concerned had taken far too long. If the criterion of time had been applied to the Nanavati Commission as well, it too would have had to be scrapped as the re-inquiry into the 1984 carnage had been set up a whole year before the Tehelka probe. But then, politically, the Government could not have got away with its disbandment because the Nanavati Commission had on the basis of evidence before it served notices on two Union ministers, Kamal Nath and Jagdish Tytler, and two other Congress MPs, Sajjan Kumar and Nikhil Kumar.

What is even more ironical is that a Congress-led Government of 2004 would not dare do what its predecessor of 1984 did so contemptously: oppose the very idea of an inquiry into the carnage. When the wounds were still fresh and the evidence so much easier to gather, the Rajiv Gandhi Government took six long months to accede to the demand for an inquiry into what remains the biggest communal carnage since Partition. This despite the fact that the government ordered an inquiry into Indira Gandhi’s assassination within four days. How could Rajiv Gandhi discriminate so flagrantly between the murder of one and the murder of many? Given that the massacre of 3,000 Sikhs was widely alleged to have been organised by Congress leaders, why did Rajiv not seize the opportunity to clear the name of his party and administration?

ELECTORAL gains is the simple answer. In his campaigning, Rajiv had no qualms in pandering to the wrath of Hindus who saw the massacre as a lesson Sikhs deserved to be taught for all the insurgency in Punjab. He stuck to the no-inquiry policy till he saw through two rounds of elections: the Lok Sabha elections of December 1984 and Assembly elections of March 1985.


200: FIRs registered in 1984 and early 1985 Only one FIR registered for one locality. It was only in 1994 that the court ordered separate chargesheets be filed
3,000 Sikhs killed
Worst hit: Trilokpuri in east Delhi where
292 people were killed over three days
Total cases in court: about 300 of which 200 are for murder
9: conviction in murder cases Consider the kind of insensitivity Rajiv betrayed especially after he won over 90 per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha. In an interview in January 1985 he said the inquiry would not help as it would only rake up ‘‘issues that are really dead.’’ Later he said he was opposed to an inquiry as ‘‘it would do more damage to the Sikhs, it would do more damage to the country by specifically opening the whole thing up again.’’

The Rajiv Gandhi Government eventually appointed the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission on April 26, 1985 to pave the way for its accord with the Akali Dal leader, H S Longowal. The inquiry appointed in such circumstances proved to be controversial because of its secretive methods. All proceedings were held in camera and there was a gag order against the press. The report that came out of such an inquiry, not surprisingly, turned out to be a blatant cover-up. Justice Misra was subsequently rewarded as a Congress member of the Rajya Sabha.

MISRA got his come-uppance in 1999 when Manmohan Singh, as the leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, extended support to the proposal of appointing a fresh inquiry into the Delhi massacre. Thus, it was only after 15 years that an inquiry was held in public and Congress leaders were for the first time held to account for their alleged complicity in the carnage.

The minimum that is expected of Justice Nanavati’s re-inquiry is that it would set the record straight on the mass killings that took place from November 1 to 3, 1984 right in the Capital. Even that may prove embarrassing to a government that has committed itself, in its so-called common minimum programme, to taking ‘‘the strictest possible action’’ against all those found to have ‘‘spread social discord and communal hatred.’’