The Indian Express - March 1, 2017
Gujarat 2002, like Delhi 1984, is a case of state culpability. One was ideological, the other strategic.
Written by Ashutosh Varshney
Gujarat riots, 2002 Gujarat riots, 2002 riots, anti-Sikh riots, 1984 anti-Sikh riots, 1984 riots, indian express editorial page, indian express Gujarat 2002 was different from Delhi 1984, only in that the Delhi violence was strategic, whereas the Gujarat pogrom were primarily ideological. (Express Archives)
February 28, 2002, had a routine beginning for me. I was in Varanasi, evaluating a student programme of the University of Michigan as a professor. Those were not social media times. While cable TV had emerged, news from Gujarat was still not filtering in, as it did in a torrent later.
When I arrived in Delhi that evening, PBS Newshour, a television news show in the US, called. They wanted me to go live to discuss the Gujarat riots at 4:30 a.m. IST, which would have been 6 p.m. on the US East Coast, saying the killings were gruesome. I could not say yes for I was to fly to the US at that time. They knew that Yale University Press had just published my book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. The book had three chapters on Gujarat.
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As the phone call ended and I switched on TV, a certain clarity emerged. I witnessed an exchange between M.J. Akbar, then with the Congress, now a BJP junior minister, and Arun Jaitley, then India’s law minister, now its finance minister. “Hinduon ke kanun mantri ho, ya Hindustan ke” (Are you the law minister of Hindus, or the law minister of India), thundered Akbar. Jaitley was nonplussed.
By midnight, it was clear that Muslims had been slaughtered in large numbers, in
retaliation for the alleged Muslim burning of two carriages of a train carrying Hindu nationalist kar sevaks (volunteers) in Godhra.
As I arrived in Michigan, it also became clear that the state government had not just failed to prevent retaliatory attacks on Muslims, but had simply looked on, or abetted. To identify those who burned Sabarmati Express was the government’s constitutional responsibility; it was not the government’s job to allow, or abet, tit-for-tat killings.
Some days later, I was on a CNN show with then-chief minister, Narendra Modi. That morning, Celia Dugger of the New York Times had published a story in which she described watching a mass burial of Muslim children in Ahmedabad (NYT, March 7, 2002). On CNN, Modi argued that things were under control and the design of those who had partitioned India (Pakistani Muslims, in other words) would be defeated. He had no words of sympathy for Gujarati Muslims.
The three most important questions about Gujarat 2002 are: Who should bear the responsibility for the mass violence? Did Gujarat 2002 have any parallels? And what should be done?
Two analytically separable issues are at stake here — legal and political. Unfortunately, the two have often been conflated. We, the social scientists, can’t determine legal culpability. That is the domain of the courts. Our tools of inquiry concentrate on groups, organisations and large social aggregates (classes, castes, ethnicities, nations). We don’t analyse individuals, except in an abstract sense.
That is not altogether helpful to courts, for they are not in the business of establishing group culpability. They need to ascertain which specific individuals are responsible for which specific acts of carnage. Some punishments have been meted out, including to a minister in Modi’s Gujarat cabinet. But Modi is the highest object of liberal and leftist ire.
He not only remains legally untouched; he is now India’s prime minister. Activists might keep legally pushing, as they should if they are convinced. But I don’t think social scientists can analytically go any further. Law is not a branch of social science. We can provide data and arguments on groups and organisations, not on individual culpability.
However, we can legitimately probe a matter of great political and moral relevance, namely, the distinction between riots and pogroms. The former is a case of government failure; the latter of government culpability. Which category applies to Gujarat 2002?
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A pogrom is defined as “a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority”. Gujarat 2002 fits this definition well. Dozens of eye-witness stories can be cited. The non-state organisations, most closely allied with the BJP government, approved of violence. The VHP called it “the first positive response of the Hindus to Muslim fundamentalism in 1,000 years”. The RSS said: “Let the minorities understand their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority,” not in laws. Finally, the courts sentenced a minister in Modi’s government to jail for leading mobs. In short, it was not a case of the government trying to prevent massacres, but one in which the government looked the other way, and considerable abetting also took place. It was a pogrom.
Unfortunately, it was not the first pogrom of independent India. One is reminded of the Delhi massacre of Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984. In Delhi at the time for graduate research, I watched a Sikh neighbour’s house attacked by a mob in Safdarjung Enclave. Though the city was under curfew, I could drive all over New Delhi, but there were no Sikhs on the street, not even in taxi stands, inconceivable in 1984. Trilokpuri was the biggest site of brutality. The cops were nowhere to be seen. Mobs attacked wantonly.
Gujarat 2002 was different from Delhi 1984, only in that the Delhi violence was strategic, whereas the Gujarat pogrom were primarily ideological. Hindu nationalism is ideologically anti-Muslim, but Congress ideology has never been anti-Sikh. That is why Sikhs have returned to the Congress, but Muslims continue to stay away from the BJP. That is also why Gujarat 2002 comes closest to the anti-Jewish pogroms of pre-revolutionary Russia.
That, despite the evidence of complicity, both Congress and BJP governments were re-elected after the massacres points to the dark belly of India’s democracy, which can turn brutally majoritarian. Luckily, no pogroms have taken place since 2002. India’s democracy now allows small riots and quotidian acts of prejudice, some quite awful, but it permits no big communal conflagrations, excepting those that get linked to national security.
Lower levels of communal violence, however, cannot be a matter of celebration. The majoritarian threat remains. Citizen oversight and the use of institutions checking executive power are the main vehicles of hope.
The writer is director, Centre for Contemporary South Asia, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University
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Showing posts with label 1984. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1984. Show all posts
March 01, 2017
February 12, 2017
India: A time to seek ‘closure’ of 1984 . . . (Harish Khare)
Between now and March 11 is perhaps the only time when it is possible to talk about the politics of justice for the 1984 anti-Sikh riot victims. At least till March 11, Punjab is in a pleasant state of a very agreeable limbo because the professional politicians are on a forced vacation. They know their exertions would have no consequence or value whatsoever. It is time to ask the question as to how long the professional politician would prevent a 'closure' on this painful episode in the history of the Sikhs, Punjab and India. The immediate provocation for this thought is the newspapers’ report of last Friday (10th). According to a report of The Tribune, the CBI wants Jagdish Tytler to undertake a lie-detection test in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots’ case. After 33 years! What a farce, what travesty of justice, what a mockery of the so-called investigation by a so-called premier investigative agency! That moment in 1984 was a horrific shame. It certainly violated then — and it violates now — our collective sense of fairness and justice that so many innocent people should have lost their lives and honour. On the political front, the Congress party has been electorally punished many times over since 1984. In 2005, a Prime Minister had offered an apology in Parliament. Yet, no ‘closure’ is permitted. If the insistence is that those ‘guilty’ should be punished, then after thirty years, it is fair to ask a question: why have we failed to punish them? The convenient accusation is that the likes of Jagdish Tytler have been able to frustrate and sabotage the processes of justice. But surely, we do know that since 1984, we have had some non-Congress governments, at the centre and in the state. And, in fact, so many commissions of inquiry have been announced and instituted. Yet, none has secured ‘justice’ for the victims. We also do know that periodically, politicians have helped themselves to a few brownie points with the Sikh voters. The great hypocrisy is that everyone knows what the game is all about. Instead of making a sincere effort to locate collective responsibility for a historic wrong, the search for ‘justice’ has been reduced to a political argument — to be brushed up and brandished at election for partisans purposes. No one has ever proposed in concrete terms what kind of ‘justice’ would be a satisfactory outcome and would invite a ‘closure.’ Journalists and historians, too, have got ensnared in the politicians’ game. On the eve of every Lok Sabha election, a few ‘investigative’ journalists come up with ‘new evidence.’ It has suited the politicians — the Akali Dal and other outfits — to keep demanding ‘justice’ for the ‘victims.’ The Akali Dal finds it a good stick to beat the Congress with. But, that is a game others have learnt to play. Newer outfits keep accusing the Akali leaders of failing to get ‘justice’ for the victims. Individual lawyers, the Phoolkas of this world, have made a career — and, now an electoral career — out of this less than honest quest for ‘justice.’ And, the busybodies in North America have given a dangerous twist to this whole ‘injustice’ business. In the process, a grave damage has got inflicted on entire Punjab — including the vast majority in the Sikh community itself. The politics of victimhood has allowed the Akali Dal and its ally, the BJP, to become indifferent to the call of good governance. An obscure journalist shoots to fame because he throws a shoe at the Home Minister of India in the name of the ‘1984 riot victims’. It would be a wonderful comeuppance for the Akalis if that same gentleman is able to cook the Badals’ goose in Lambi. A few days ago, when I was in Deoband (in Saharanpur district of western Uttar Pradesh), I got a chance to meet Haseeb Siddiqui, general manager of the Muslim Fund Trust, a kind of bank for the poor, an institution that practises the Islamic stipulation of not charging interest on loans given. This institution has been at it since 1961 and Janab Haseeb Siddiqui was there at the very start and continues to preside over it even at the age of 78, with an undiminished clarity of purpose. Siddiqui sahib is a city elder. He is associated with many schools, an eye hospital, a library and some training centres. With great pride, he told me that he had only a pen and nothing else when it was decided to set up a banking outfit, based on Islamic tenets, and since then, sheer dedication and faith have helped him steer the expansion and consolidation of this ‘fund trust.’ It is vibrant evidence of the civil society and its potential to fill the gaps left unattended by the state. What I found rather engaging about visiting the Muslim Fund Trust and meeting its general manager was a sense of serenity, an unperturbed sense of direction. Even though he wore traditional attire, there was nothing stereotypical about him. A modern, practical mind at work. A horrific, horrific death has been reported from Sector 9 of Chandigarh. When I came to this city about eighteen months ago, I was told that Sector 9 was the last bastion of civilisation, it was an enclave of superiority and sophistication. It certainly has the reputation of being the most affluent part of City Beautiful. And, now we learn of this horrible death, a violent death, in the sector involving a luxury car and a cast of characters that can only be called ‘raeeszadas.’ It is of course deeply disappointing that the police have been seen dragging their feet because the accused happen to be ‘well connected.’ The police ‘moved’ only because the victim’s family was equally well connected and was able to bring to bear its own clout. This utterly violent death tells us only one thing: something is going horribly wrong in our society. We are becoming too angry, too edgy, too prone to giving offence and equally prone to taking offence. Our popular culture — films, television, pop singers — promotes a roughness in manners and morals. The counterpoise is missing. For an ancient society that takes inordinate pride in its civilisational resilience, the role models are few and far between. The schools are no longer imparting attitudes and values of moral rectitude. Even religious leaders have become petty entrepreneurs, hawking their wares and wisdom in the marketplace. The advertisers are vacuum-cleaning all noble values and healthy sentiments of their meaning by associating them with this or that product. There is a new feel of violence in the air. The Prime Minister is leading the way. Each day, he injects a note of aggression in his words and, what is more, he invites all of us to feel good about it. This daily exhibition of violent words has become the ‘new normal.’ Then, we have the wonderful blessing called the social media. We abuse and invite abuse and feel fully fulfilled being abusive. The anonymity allows us to be uncouth and uncivilised. History bears witness to a simple fact: violence in words invariably leads to violence in deeds, in the streets. I am afraid, soon we shall see violence in our Parliament. LAST week I found myself in Deoband, the seat of the great Darul Uloom. Deoband suddenly brings you face-to-face with the diversity of Indian culture. I was there to try to make some sense of the electoral chemistry being cooked up; it was imperative that I should seek out influential voices in the town. The only problem was that the streets were too narrow for our SUV. Though the weather was fine, walking from one interlocutor to another would have been too time-consuming. Our local host had a solution: we pillion-ride with him on his motor-bike. So, it came about that I found myself having to ride a bike after nearly thirty years. It was a hair-raising experience. Three of us, without helmets; it was nerve-wrecking. All the associations came flooding to mind. Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Bob Dylan crashing his motorbike. For those fleeting minutes I tried to practise what the Zen practitioners call ‘mindfulness.’ Nothing worked. What does work is a bracing drink of hot, piping coffee. Try it.
December 27, 2015
Call for Papers : (E)razed Chapters: Remembering the Tales of Mourning Carnage ’84
Call for Papers
(E)razed Chapters:
Remembering the Tales of Mourning
Carnage ’84
Editor: Ishmeet Kaur
Introduction
In 1984, the capital city Delhi along with some other major cities nation-wide, like Bokaro and Kanpur witnessed four days of violence against the Sikh populations residing in them. The carnage was a consequence of the assassination of the then Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. The situation in Delhi and in many places across India was no less than a civil war as Sikhs were being identified and killed by the mob. Post violence, anger towards the Sikh community was visible as the assassinators were the Sikh bodyguards, but thousands of those who were killed during the violence have not received legal justice till date.
The historical analysis reveals the political strategies by the governing party that led to uncontrollable and undesirable militant activities prevalent during early 80’s in Punjab and how this was converted into a communal discourse that led to the black listing of the Sikh Community. Historical similarity is visible in the communal tension during 1947 and that in 1984. The victims of ’84, who had witness ’47 could relate very closely to events of ’47 during ’84.
Thirty-one years down the line, it becomes important to voice the experiences of the victims. The main focus of the study is to address concerns of the present generations and the impact of the carnage on their life. Every human being has a right to live a decent living. Unfortunately, the impact of the events of a day pushed the Sikh community into corners as an “othered” minority. A visit to Tilak Vihar widow’s colony brings to fore the everyday struggle of the new generations, issues of rehabilitation, unemployment, drug addiction and criminal tendencies which is an outcome of the traumatic impact of the psyche of the victims and their families.
The three decades following ’84 Carnage, have been years of silence regarding the event. Very few writers, critics, poets and dramatists have written on the subject. 1947 partition also witnessed similar silence regarding the violence but for a decade. In the following years, 1960 onwards witnessed a never-ending flow of writings, renderings, discussions, representations and various forms of expressions through TV serials, films, creative writing and academic research. On the other hand, 1984 carnage has met a distinct muting on the subject, may be due to political involvement or because of the gruesome nature of violence.
Institutionally, at all fronts, be it legal, political, religious or social, the subject has met little representation but huge censorship and deliberated muting. On the legal front, thousands of cases have been lying pending in the Indian courts for all these years. Not a single victim has been given any justice.
It becomes important to revisit such incidences so that they don’t get repeated again to people of any community what so ever. Such incidences are shameful blots on the nation and its people but the impact extends universally to all human beings. Thus, the silences need to be broken and common concern for human rights be voiced.
Aim and Objective:
The objective of the project is to prepare an anthology of writings related to the ’84 pogrom. Some works (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and journalistic writings) are available, they are not sufficient. The project shall anthologize works already available in English, regional languages and translation in English, and invite new writings in several genres (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography and life-narratives) by writers, critics and victims of the violence.
The novelty of the anthology will be that there would be a section on life –narratives where oral histories of the victims shall be transcribed after being recorded having visited the Widows colony in Tilak Vihar, New Delhi. Also, a section on photographs would be included. These photographs shall be those which are already available and also new photos of the present condition of the widow’s colonies. Moreover, duly acknowledged news items related to the coverage of the event published in regional languages and in newspapers of different countries shall be included.
The project aims to study in detail the historical, political and literary aspects around Carnage ’84. Ironically, with the changing times, the dynamics of the aforesaid structure has undergone immense transformation. The community has felt threatened and suffered at the hands of its own people and from the ones to whom they provided security in the past. Moreover, there is a sense of utter betrayal since there was a complete breakdown of machinery and institutional structure.
Contributions may be submitted on any of the following sub-themes related to Carnage’84
i. Censorship and Deliberated Muting
ii. Narrating Violence
iii. Humiliation: Violence, Looting and Rape
iv. Contested Bodies and Psychic Influences
v. Recording the Silences
vi. Fear Psychosis and the Scare
vii. Identity-Markers and the Ma(r)king
viii. Democracy and Minority Rights
ix. Legal Justice and Majority Impact
x. Revisiting the Experience of Trauma
xi. The Survivor’s Guilt
xii. Recovering from the Trauma: Memory and Amnesia
xiii. After-Experience: Returning and Recovering
xiv. Overcoming and Hope
xv. Rewriting the Past: Significance and Limitations
xvi. Testimonials and Documentation: Formal Evidence v/s Real Experiences
xvii. Reviving the History: Revisiting Partition through the Carnage
xviii. Archiving the Records: Relevance, Importance and Limitations
xix. Media and Depiction of Violence
xx. Cinematic (mis)representation of the Violence and Trauma
Contributions may be submitted in form of prose, poetry, short stories, plays, life-narrative, interviews, oral-histories, any other experimental/creative forms of writing the experience. (Word limit may vary)
Critical papers may be limited to 5000 words.
Visual and Graphic representations may be photographs or scanned paintings, duly acknowledged.
Translations in English may be submitted along with the permission of the writer or publisher with the full papers. Details of original source may be provided with the abstract. The original source shall be printed along with the Translation.
Newspaper Coverage: News items published preferably in regional languages translated into English may be retrieved from archives (older newspapers) and may be submitted for reprinting. Contributions from News items related to the event published in archived newspapers abroad (in different countries) may be submitted. These submissions should acknowledge the source.
Contributions may be emailed to projectcarnage84@gmail.com
Important Dates:
Submission of Abstracts (500 words) : 1st Feb, 2016
Acceptance of Abstracts : 15th March, 2016
Submission of Final Papers/ Contributions : 1st Sept, 2016
Expected month of publication of the anthology : Dec, 2017
Note: The anthology is an outcome of a project supported by Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar.
Bio-note of the Editor:
Dr Ishmeet Kaur is an Assistant Professor of English in the Centre for English Studies at Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. She has 12 years of teaching experience. Her latest works have been on issues related to violence, its after-effect and matters of representation. She has been involved in recording the women’s experiences largely with respect to literature from/ of the margins.
At present she is actively engaged in a project on “(E)razed Chapters: Remembering the Tales of Mourning Carnage ’84” funded by Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. She has been working on Literatures from the Margins, Post-colonial Studies, Australian Literature and Sikh Studies. Along with the main stream Australian Literature, she has ventured into Indigenous studies of Australia and India.
She has been continuously translating women’s experiences from Punjabi into English and from English into Punjabi. She has translated works of Bushra Ezaj, Pakistani writer Just Before the Dream (2011) and Veena Verma, Punjabi Diasporic writer’s short stories from Punjabi into English (published in Indian Literature: A Journal by Sahitya Akademy); and Australian Aboriginal writer Jeanine Leane’s book Dark Secrets: After Dreaming (AD)1887--1961 from English into Punjabi (2014). She has lately published an edited volume on Patrick White, Patrick White: Critical Issues, 2014. She has several articles in various books and Journals.
At CUG, she has been engaged in teaching courses such as Marginality and Literature, Nation and Literature, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Research Methods and is the Co-ordinator for Writing Skills Enhancement Project. She is also an Associate at IIAS, Shimla.
(E)razed Chapters:
Remembering the Tales of Mourning
Carnage ’84
Editor: Ishmeet Kaur
Introduction
In 1984, the capital city Delhi along with some other major cities nation-wide, like Bokaro and Kanpur witnessed four days of violence against the Sikh populations residing in them. The carnage was a consequence of the assassination of the then Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. The situation in Delhi and in many places across India was no less than a civil war as Sikhs were being identified and killed by the mob. Post violence, anger towards the Sikh community was visible as the assassinators were the Sikh bodyguards, but thousands of those who were killed during the violence have not received legal justice till date.
The historical analysis reveals the political strategies by the governing party that led to uncontrollable and undesirable militant activities prevalent during early 80’s in Punjab and how this was converted into a communal discourse that led to the black listing of the Sikh Community. Historical similarity is visible in the communal tension during 1947 and that in 1984. The victims of ’84, who had witness ’47 could relate very closely to events of ’47 during ’84.
Thirty-one years down the line, it becomes important to voice the experiences of the victims. The main focus of the study is to address concerns of the present generations and the impact of the carnage on their life. Every human being has a right to live a decent living. Unfortunately, the impact of the events of a day pushed the Sikh community into corners as an “othered” minority. A visit to Tilak Vihar widow’s colony brings to fore the everyday struggle of the new generations, issues of rehabilitation, unemployment, drug addiction and criminal tendencies which is an outcome of the traumatic impact of the psyche of the victims and their families.
The three decades following ’84 Carnage, have been years of silence regarding the event. Very few writers, critics, poets and dramatists have written on the subject. 1947 partition also witnessed similar silence regarding the violence but for a decade. In the following years, 1960 onwards witnessed a never-ending flow of writings, renderings, discussions, representations and various forms of expressions through TV serials, films, creative writing and academic research. On the other hand, 1984 carnage has met a distinct muting on the subject, may be due to political involvement or because of the gruesome nature of violence.
Institutionally, at all fronts, be it legal, political, religious or social, the subject has met little representation but huge censorship and deliberated muting. On the legal front, thousands of cases have been lying pending in the Indian courts for all these years. Not a single victim has been given any justice.
It becomes important to revisit such incidences so that they don’t get repeated again to people of any community what so ever. Such incidences are shameful blots on the nation and its people but the impact extends universally to all human beings. Thus, the silences need to be broken and common concern for human rights be voiced.
Aim and Objective:
The objective of the project is to prepare an anthology of writings related to the ’84 pogrom. Some works (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and journalistic writings) are available, they are not sufficient. The project shall anthologize works already available in English, regional languages and translation in English, and invite new writings in several genres (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography and life-narratives) by writers, critics and victims of the violence.
The novelty of the anthology will be that there would be a section on life –narratives where oral histories of the victims shall be transcribed after being recorded having visited the Widows colony in Tilak Vihar, New Delhi. Also, a section on photographs would be included. These photographs shall be those which are already available and also new photos of the present condition of the widow’s colonies. Moreover, duly acknowledged news items related to the coverage of the event published in regional languages and in newspapers of different countries shall be included.
The project aims to study in detail the historical, political and literary aspects around Carnage ’84. Ironically, with the changing times, the dynamics of the aforesaid structure has undergone immense transformation. The community has felt threatened and suffered at the hands of its own people and from the ones to whom they provided security in the past. Moreover, there is a sense of utter betrayal since there was a complete breakdown of machinery and institutional structure.
Contributions may be submitted on any of the following sub-themes related to Carnage’84
i. Censorship and Deliberated Muting
ii. Narrating Violence
iii. Humiliation: Violence, Looting and Rape
iv. Contested Bodies and Psychic Influences
v. Recording the Silences
vi. Fear Psychosis and the Scare
vii. Identity-Markers and the Ma(r)king
viii. Democracy and Minority Rights
ix. Legal Justice and Majority Impact
x. Revisiting the Experience of Trauma
xi. The Survivor’s Guilt
xii. Recovering from the Trauma: Memory and Amnesia
xiii. After-Experience: Returning and Recovering
xiv. Overcoming and Hope
xv. Rewriting the Past: Significance and Limitations
xvi. Testimonials and Documentation: Formal Evidence v/s Real Experiences
xvii. Reviving the History: Revisiting Partition through the Carnage
xviii. Archiving the Records: Relevance, Importance and Limitations
xix. Media and Depiction of Violence
xx. Cinematic (mis)representation of the Violence and Trauma
Contributions may be submitted in form of prose, poetry, short stories, plays, life-narrative, interviews, oral-histories, any other experimental/creative forms of writing the experience. (Word limit may vary)
Critical papers may be limited to 5000 words.
Visual and Graphic representations may be photographs or scanned paintings, duly acknowledged.
Translations in English may be submitted along with the permission of the writer or publisher with the full papers. Details of original source may be provided with the abstract. The original source shall be printed along with the Translation.
Newspaper Coverage: News items published preferably in regional languages translated into English may be retrieved from archives (older newspapers) and may be submitted for reprinting. Contributions from News items related to the event published in archived newspapers abroad (in different countries) may be submitted. These submissions should acknowledge the source.
Contributions may be emailed to projectcarnage84@gmail.com
Important Dates:
Submission of Abstracts (500 words) : 1st Feb, 2016
Acceptance of Abstracts : 15th March, 2016
Submission of Final Papers/ Contributions : 1st Sept, 2016
Expected month of publication of the anthology : Dec, 2017
Note: The anthology is an outcome of a project supported by Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar.
Bio-note of the Editor:
Dr Ishmeet Kaur is an Assistant Professor of English in the Centre for English Studies at Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. She has 12 years of teaching experience. Her latest works have been on issues related to violence, its after-effect and matters of representation. She has been involved in recording the women’s experiences largely with respect to literature from/ of the margins.
At present she is actively engaged in a project on “(E)razed Chapters: Remembering the Tales of Mourning Carnage ’84” funded by Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. She has been working on Literatures from the Margins, Post-colonial Studies, Australian Literature and Sikh Studies. Along with the main stream Australian Literature, she has ventured into Indigenous studies of Australia and India.
She has been continuously translating women’s experiences from Punjabi into English and from English into Punjabi. She has translated works of Bushra Ezaj, Pakistani writer Just Before the Dream (2011) and Veena Verma, Punjabi Diasporic writer’s short stories from Punjabi into English (published in Indian Literature: A Journal by Sahitya Akademy); and Australian Aboriginal writer Jeanine Leane’s book Dark Secrets: After Dreaming (AD)1887--1961 from English into Punjabi (2014). She has lately published an edited volume on Patrick White, Patrick White: Critical Issues, 2014. She has several articles in various books and Journals.
At CUG, she has been engaged in teaching courses such as Marginality and Literature, Nation and Literature, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Research Methods and is the Co-ordinator for Writing Skills Enhancement Project. She is also an Associate at IIAS, Shimla.
October 26, 2015
An extract from 'Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984 by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay' (DNA, 17 oct 2015)
Daily News and Analysis - 17 October 2015
The 1984 pogrom
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
An extract from 'Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984' by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay; published by Westland Limited
On the third day of rioting (by then the Army had moved into several riot-affected areas), Swaranpreet cajoled a friend, also a local Youth Congress leader, to accompany him to Hari Nagar. Once he was assured of his relatives’ safety, Swaranpreet and his friend became adventurous and decided to take stock of various colonies that had been obvious targets of arson. It was either while walking aimlessly on a desolate street or perhaps in a corner — Swaranpreet failed to recollect the exact place – when they found a young teenage girl. It was obvious that she had been brutally and repeatedly raped.
The two young men covered her with a sheet-like cloth material and hurried to get medical aid but none of the hospitals agreed to admit a rape victim. The girl eventually died on Swaranpreet’s lap. He was numbed yet again and his thoughts went back to the time when he and his elder brother had heard of the selective identification of Sikhs in Haryana in early 1984. As he looked at the dead girl’s face, the aspiring surgeon realised how his worst fears had come true.
If that wasn’t enough to force Swaranpreet to deviate from his chosen path, a ghoulish experience awaited him within days of rejoining duty. One afternoon, the police walked in with a sixty-five-year-old woman and demanded that Swaranpreet issue a certificate to declare her mentally unfit to testify as a witness in a case. It was obvious that the police were setting her up but Swaranpreet risked their ire and while proceeding to examine the woman, he began speaking to her.
The gruesome tale unfolded bit by bit… She was a Sikh resident of a west Delhi slum and lived in a shanty. Her son was a routine offender, but this time around, he was arrested several days before the pogrom, she said and had fortunately escaped the mayhem on the streets. A few days later, there were rumours that the cops had killed all the Sikh detainees in custody. The woman then told Swaranpreet how she had gone from one police station to another looking for her missing son, but to no avail. One day out of sheer helplessness, she began to lament loudly in one of the police stations and didn’t stop despite attempts to hush her into silence. This became a regular nuisance for the police and they did what they knew best: put her behind bars.
Swaranpreet heard the woman in silence. She claimed the police had inserted a stick inside her… When he finally found the courage to give her an internal examination, Swaranpreet realised that she had been cruelly violated. That night, he gulped down a bottle of whisky to numb his mind, before sleep finally overtook him. The next morning, while nursing a monster of a hangover, he recalled how he had wanted to kill someone the previous night….
Around the time Swaranpreet was walking the streets of Rajouri Garden with his family’s ceremonial sword, Joginder Singh, a forty-five-year-old Sikligar Sikh was huddled inside a claustrophobic room with his family and sundry relatives.
Packed like the proverbial sardines, the adults sat in deathly silence and hushed the children into silence even if they made the slightest of noise. A “zero-watt”, incandescent bulb cast a pale yellow light in the room. From a distance, they could hear a low buzz — as if a beehive was stirring into life. The undecipherable, low-grade atonal chorus wafted into the room and the terrified men and women knew that the mobs were approaching. They had come visiting earlier in the evening in the narrow bylanes of their Block 30, Trilokpuri house.
In one corner of the room lay a steel paraat — a circular utensil with a raised edge — traditionally used to knead dough from wheat flour. Joginder’s wife, Surjit Kaur looked at the huge quantity of dough one last time before putting it away in the tiny kitchen on the ground floor. Even in the faint light, she could see clumps of hair stuck to the perfectly kneaded dough. A fan had accidentally been switched on by someone when hair from the heads and faces of several Sikh men had swirled into the paraat… Only Joginder Singh had refused to shear his hair. The others — his two sons, an elder brother and a few relatives visiting from West Bengal — had heeded the advice sounded earlier in the evening: ‘If the Sikhs want to be safe, they better cut their hair and shave off their beards.’
Joginder Singh was firm in his decision and categorically told the others that he was prepared to lose his life but not his turban. Although he wasn’t a devout Sikh, he felt outraged at the pressure that was being exerted on him to cut his hair. After all, he had always held a romantic idea of being a Sikh, or a Sardar, and felt a sense of valour with the turban on his head. Little did he realise that his headgear would send out a wrong signal.
But back then, the men used kitchen scissors to cut their hair, and while most performed the act on each other, the women were also included in carrying out this emotionally distressing task. The trimmings could not be thrown outside the house, and thus lay scattered in the room. While longer tresses fell limply on the uneven floor, smaller locks flew and made the dough unfit for consumption. The group went hungry for three days till Army trucks arrived in their colony to transfer them to a nearby makeshift “refugee camp”.
Trilokpuri was a little-known slum that functioned as part of East Delhi’s underbelly along with its twin settlement — Kalyanpuri. The two were among several localities that were developed in Delhi in the mid-1970s and were termed ubiquitously as “resettlement colonies”; with houses built on twenty-five square yard plots, they were devoid of any civic amenities. During the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s overzealous son, Sanjay had taken it upon himself to “cleanse” and beautify India’s capital city and the scum was therefore pushed away to the margins of Delhi.
Eventually, Joginder Singh and his family escaped the fury of the mobs in Trilokpuri because a man amongst them possessed a unique talent and used it wisely when the mobs came hunting. A clean-shaven Sikh who spoke chaste Bengali and manipulated the killers into leaving them alone! But if there was one other moment which took a toll on the family, it was when Joginder Singh’s eldest daughter-in-law, Rani went into premature labour.
With no medical aid at hand, the neighbourhood women stepped in to deliver the child. In that tiny room, with the young mother shielded from men-folk by a flimsy sheet of cloth, a baby stepped into life to become one amongst thousands, on a day when the lives of their parents were torn asunder. For some, this became a lifelong identity and for others like Jasmeet Kaur who was barely forty-five days old that day, it became a millstone, a reminder of an incident no one ever forgot.
On the third day, dusk finally brought relief to Joginder Singh and his family. The loud and agonising shouts of people had died down and was replaced by loud announcements on megaphones — an authoritative male voice asking those in hiding to come out. The Army had arrived to rescue them.
An extract from Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984 by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay; published by Westland Limited
The 1984 pogrom
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay
An extract from 'Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984' by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay; published by Westland Limited
On the third day of rioting (by then the Army had moved into several riot-affected areas), Swaranpreet cajoled a friend, also a local Youth Congress leader, to accompany him to Hari Nagar. Once he was assured of his relatives’ safety, Swaranpreet and his friend became adventurous and decided to take stock of various colonies that had been obvious targets of arson. It was either while walking aimlessly on a desolate street or perhaps in a corner — Swaranpreet failed to recollect the exact place – when they found a young teenage girl. It was obvious that she had been brutally and repeatedly raped.
The two young men covered her with a sheet-like cloth material and hurried to get medical aid but none of the hospitals agreed to admit a rape victim. The girl eventually died on Swaranpreet’s lap. He was numbed yet again and his thoughts went back to the time when he and his elder brother had heard of the selective identification of Sikhs in Haryana in early 1984. As he looked at the dead girl’s face, the aspiring surgeon realised how his worst fears had come true.
If that wasn’t enough to force Swaranpreet to deviate from his chosen path, a ghoulish experience awaited him within days of rejoining duty. One afternoon, the police walked in with a sixty-five-year-old woman and demanded that Swaranpreet issue a certificate to declare her mentally unfit to testify as a witness in a case. It was obvious that the police were setting her up but Swaranpreet risked their ire and while proceeding to examine the woman, he began speaking to her.
The gruesome tale unfolded bit by bit… She was a Sikh resident of a west Delhi slum and lived in a shanty. Her son was a routine offender, but this time around, he was arrested several days before the pogrom, she said and had fortunately escaped the mayhem on the streets. A few days later, there were rumours that the cops had killed all the Sikh detainees in custody. The woman then told Swaranpreet how she had gone from one police station to another looking for her missing son, but to no avail. One day out of sheer helplessness, she began to lament loudly in one of the police stations and didn’t stop despite attempts to hush her into silence. This became a regular nuisance for the police and they did what they knew best: put her behind bars.
Swaranpreet heard the woman in silence. She claimed the police had inserted a stick inside her… When he finally found the courage to give her an internal examination, Swaranpreet realised that she had been cruelly violated. That night, he gulped down a bottle of whisky to numb his mind, before sleep finally overtook him. The next morning, while nursing a monster of a hangover, he recalled how he had wanted to kill someone the previous night….
Around the time Swaranpreet was walking the streets of Rajouri Garden with his family’s ceremonial sword, Joginder Singh, a forty-five-year-old Sikligar Sikh was huddled inside a claustrophobic room with his family and sundry relatives.
Packed like the proverbial sardines, the adults sat in deathly silence and hushed the children into silence even if they made the slightest of noise. A “zero-watt”, incandescent bulb cast a pale yellow light in the room. From a distance, they could hear a low buzz — as if a beehive was stirring into life. The undecipherable, low-grade atonal chorus wafted into the room and the terrified men and women knew that the mobs were approaching. They had come visiting earlier in the evening in the narrow bylanes of their Block 30, Trilokpuri house.
In one corner of the room lay a steel paraat — a circular utensil with a raised edge — traditionally used to knead dough from wheat flour. Joginder’s wife, Surjit Kaur looked at the huge quantity of dough one last time before putting it away in the tiny kitchen on the ground floor. Even in the faint light, she could see clumps of hair stuck to the perfectly kneaded dough. A fan had accidentally been switched on by someone when hair from the heads and faces of several Sikh men had swirled into the paraat… Only Joginder Singh had refused to shear his hair. The others — his two sons, an elder brother and a few relatives visiting from West Bengal — had heeded the advice sounded earlier in the evening: ‘If the Sikhs want to be safe, they better cut their hair and shave off their beards.’
Joginder Singh was firm in his decision and categorically told the others that he was prepared to lose his life but not his turban. Although he wasn’t a devout Sikh, he felt outraged at the pressure that was being exerted on him to cut his hair. After all, he had always held a romantic idea of being a Sikh, or a Sardar, and felt a sense of valour with the turban on his head. Little did he realise that his headgear would send out a wrong signal.
But back then, the men used kitchen scissors to cut their hair, and while most performed the act on each other, the women were also included in carrying out this emotionally distressing task. The trimmings could not be thrown outside the house, and thus lay scattered in the room. While longer tresses fell limply on the uneven floor, smaller locks flew and made the dough unfit for consumption. The group went hungry for three days till Army trucks arrived in their colony to transfer them to a nearby makeshift “refugee camp”.
Trilokpuri was a little-known slum that functioned as part of East Delhi’s underbelly along with its twin settlement — Kalyanpuri. The two were among several localities that were developed in Delhi in the mid-1970s and were termed ubiquitously as “resettlement colonies”; with houses built on twenty-five square yard plots, they were devoid of any civic amenities. During the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s overzealous son, Sanjay had taken it upon himself to “cleanse” and beautify India’s capital city and the scum was therefore pushed away to the margins of Delhi.
Eventually, Joginder Singh and his family escaped the fury of the mobs in Trilokpuri because a man amongst them possessed a unique talent and used it wisely when the mobs came hunting. A clean-shaven Sikh who spoke chaste Bengali and manipulated the killers into leaving them alone! But if there was one other moment which took a toll on the family, it was when Joginder Singh’s eldest daughter-in-law, Rani went into premature labour.
With no medical aid at hand, the neighbourhood women stepped in to deliver the child. In that tiny room, with the young mother shielded from men-folk by a flimsy sheet of cloth, a baby stepped into life to become one amongst thousands, on a day when the lives of their parents were torn asunder. For some, this became a lifelong identity and for others like Jasmeet Kaur who was barely forty-five days old that day, it became a millstone, a reminder of an incident no one ever forgot.
On the third day, dusk finally brought relief to Joginder Singh and his family. The loud and agonising shouts of people had died down and was replaced by loud announcements on megaphones — an authoritative male voice asking those in hiding to come out. The Army had arrived to rescue them.
An extract from Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984 by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay; published by Westland Limited
November 11, 2014
Righteous sectarian hatred returns to India (Pankaj Mishra)
The Japan Times, Nov 11, 2014
Righteous sectarian hatred returns to India
by Pankaj Mishra
Bloomberg
NEW YORK – Exactly 30 years ago this month, lynch mobs led by politicians slaughtered almost 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi, in some cases by hanging burning tires around their necks. The pogrom came as retaliation for the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. In nationwide elections held a few weeks later, the Congress party, some of whose members had helped supervise the killings, won in a landslide.
With state elections approaching, parts of Delhi are again awash with manufactured hate. The Trilokpuri neighborhood, which witnessed the deaths of hundreds of Sikhs in 1984, recently suffered clashes between Hindus and Muslims, as well as a brutal police crackdown on the minority community.
A resurgence of communal violence and hatred elsewhere in the country also recalls the largely unpunished crimes of 1984 and their bitter lessons: how mass murderers can be rewarded with huge electoral victories and high political office, and how the judicial system can be gamed in full view of a largely acquiescent if not craven media.
In an insightful article in the Economic and Political Weekly, the historian Dilip Simeon argues that “the year 1984 set a new standard for the normalization of brutality and lawlessness” in India. Today many Indians “do not believe that involvement in mass crimes should disqualify anyone from holding executive power. They distinguish ‘development’ from justice, forgetting that ‘development’ without secular norms and lawful governance will lead to tyranny.”
Simeon sees the Congress’ cynical use of violence in 1984 as a “force-multiplier” for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, whose religious-political campaigns in the early 1990s led to thousands of deaths. The anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 resuscitated the BJP in the state and set the stage for Narendra Modi’s subsequent ascent to the summit of power in Delhi.
There is one important difference, however. Divide-and-rule is now more than an opportunistic electoral gambit: The extended family of Hindu nationalists seems to be looking past election victories in hopes of drastically remaking India’s social and political landscape. Their aim is to consolidate a permanent Hindu majority against such real and imagined aliens as Muslims, Christians, liberals, communists, secularists, Western NGOs and independent-minded women.
During this year’s election campaign, Modi attacked the incumbent Congress government for allegedly killing rhinoceroses to clear land in India’s northeast for Bangladeshi Muslim settlers. As prime minister now, exposed to the full glare of international scrutiny, Modi leaves it to his supporters to elaborate on the potent theme of insidious internal and external enemies.
One of their favored memes is the “love jihad” — the term recently employed by a BJP legislator to accuse Muslims of Islamicizing India by impregnating Hindu women. As the writer Sonia Faleiro wrote last month in the New York Times, “consenting adults who have broken no laws have been threatened, beaten up and, in a medieval twist, had their faces painted black by pumped-up bands of roving men.”
Hindu vigilantes, who have long assaulted supposedly immoral women and burned books and paintings, enjoy a new respectability and influence. The books of Dinanath Batra, who led the campaign to pulp Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindus,” have been made compulsory reading in Gujarat’s schools, while distinguished historian Romila Thapar, who authored the “Penguin History of Early India,” is abused as a “sickular commie” by mainstream commentators no less than online stalkers. The head of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has been proscribed twice in independent India for fomenting violence, was given a prime time slot on state television to rant against Muslim infiltrators.
Indeed, a senior BJP leader appealed last month, at Delhi’s National Museum no less, for a public bonfire of canonical history books. He had previously urged that Muslims be stripped of voting rights until they acknowledge their Hindu ancestry. Both proposals were resoundingly supported by his nearly 1 million followers on Twitter.
Neo-Hindu tweeters and bloggers who command virtual lynch mobs on social media best embody the nihilist ethos that everything is permitted.
India’s public (or at least its online) life suddenly seems dominated by people Simeon bluntly describes as “sociopaths and criminally insane persons … whose lust for power poisons the very air we breathe.”
Out of despair, Simeon invests his faith in political leaders who “ought not to reinforce popular prejudice, but should speak reasonably to calm passions.” Modi, however, shows no signs of moving toward a Sistah Souljah moment. Three decades after India witnessed the carnage provoked by unchecked communal demagoguery, there seem to be fewer and fewer political or ethical constraints on Indians who are drunk on righteous hate.
Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg columnist.
Righteous sectarian hatred returns to India
by Pankaj Mishra
Bloomberg
NEW YORK – Exactly 30 years ago this month, lynch mobs led by politicians slaughtered almost 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi, in some cases by hanging burning tires around their necks. The pogrom came as retaliation for the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. In nationwide elections held a few weeks later, the Congress party, some of whose members had helped supervise the killings, won in a landslide.
With state elections approaching, parts of Delhi are again awash with manufactured hate. The Trilokpuri neighborhood, which witnessed the deaths of hundreds of Sikhs in 1984, recently suffered clashes between Hindus and Muslims, as well as a brutal police crackdown on the minority community.
A resurgence of communal violence and hatred elsewhere in the country also recalls the largely unpunished crimes of 1984 and their bitter lessons: how mass murderers can be rewarded with huge electoral victories and high political office, and how the judicial system can be gamed in full view of a largely acquiescent if not craven media.
In an insightful article in the Economic and Political Weekly, the historian Dilip Simeon argues that “the year 1984 set a new standard for the normalization of brutality and lawlessness” in India. Today many Indians “do not believe that involvement in mass crimes should disqualify anyone from holding executive power. They distinguish ‘development’ from justice, forgetting that ‘development’ without secular norms and lawful governance will lead to tyranny.”
Simeon sees the Congress’ cynical use of violence in 1984 as a “force-multiplier” for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, whose religious-political campaigns in the early 1990s led to thousands of deaths. The anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002 resuscitated the BJP in the state and set the stage for Narendra Modi’s subsequent ascent to the summit of power in Delhi.
There is one important difference, however. Divide-and-rule is now more than an opportunistic electoral gambit: The extended family of Hindu nationalists seems to be looking past election victories in hopes of drastically remaking India’s social and political landscape. Their aim is to consolidate a permanent Hindu majority against such real and imagined aliens as Muslims, Christians, liberals, communists, secularists, Western NGOs and independent-minded women.
During this year’s election campaign, Modi attacked the incumbent Congress government for allegedly killing rhinoceroses to clear land in India’s northeast for Bangladeshi Muslim settlers. As prime minister now, exposed to the full glare of international scrutiny, Modi leaves it to his supporters to elaborate on the potent theme of insidious internal and external enemies.
One of their favored memes is the “love jihad” — the term recently employed by a BJP legislator to accuse Muslims of Islamicizing India by impregnating Hindu women. As the writer Sonia Faleiro wrote last month in the New York Times, “consenting adults who have broken no laws have been threatened, beaten up and, in a medieval twist, had their faces painted black by pumped-up bands of roving men.”
Hindu vigilantes, who have long assaulted supposedly immoral women and burned books and paintings, enjoy a new respectability and influence. The books of Dinanath Batra, who led the campaign to pulp Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindus,” have been made compulsory reading in Gujarat’s schools, while distinguished historian Romila Thapar, who authored the “Penguin History of Early India,” is abused as a “sickular commie” by mainstream commentators no less than online stalkers. The head of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has been proscribed twice in independent India for fomenting violence, was given a prime time slot on state television to rant against Muslim infiltrators.
Indeed, a senior BJP leader appealed last month, at Delhi’s National Museum no less, for a public bonfire of canonical history books. He had previously urged that Muslims be stripped of voting rights until they acknowledge their Hindu ancestry. Both proposals were resoundingly supported by his nearly 1 million followers on Twitter.
Neo-Hindu tweeters and bloggers who command virtual lynch mobs on social media best embody the nihilist ethos that everything is permitted.
India’s public (or at least its online) life suddenly seems dominated by people Simeon bluntly describes as “sociopaths and criminally insane persons … whose lust for power poisons the very air we breathe.”
Out of despair, Simeon invests his faith in political leaders who “ought not to reinforce popular prejudice, but should speak reasonably to calm passions.” Modi, however, shows no signs of moving toward a Sistah Souljah moment. Three decades after India witnessed the carnage provoked by unchecked communal demagoguery, there seem to be fewer and fewer political or ethical constraints on Indians who are drunk on righteous hate.
Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg columnist.
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