by Harinder Baweja
New Delhi, April 28, 2012
The skyline was dark; it was uncomfortably grey and it stayed that way. For three long days and nights, the Capital resembled a huge funeral pyre to its west and east, and the stench of burning rubber and bodies started filling the air. Word had spread that Indira Gandhi had been shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards and a motley crowd of angry blood-thirsty protestors roamed the streets, hunting down turbaned men and their children; sprinkling them with kerosene or simply throwing burnt tyres around their necks.
That time, from late-evening of October 31 to November 3 in 1984, a daughter saw her father being set on fire, a wife looked on helplessly as her husband and son were dragged by lumpens and bludgeoned to death with iron rods and a brother lost three siblings. He identified them from the watch one was wearing and the other two, from their half-burnt clothes.
Daughter Nirpreet Kaur, wife Jagdish Kaur and brother Jagsher Singh have lived a wretched life in the pursuit of justice, perhaps because they had seen a powerful Congressman and Member of Parliament of the area, Sajjan Kumar, exhort the mob and order the killing of Sikhs in the Raj Nagar locality, in Delhi Cantonment. For 27 of the 28 years, each of the three have variously approached the police and the many commissions of inquiry (see box) to give a first-hand, ‘I witnessed the carnage’ account, but it stayed buried in affidavit after affidavit.
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