The anti-Sikh Pogrom of 1984: Three Days of Horror

By Rahul Bedi [one of the journalists who stumbled across the massacre in East Delhi].

The anti-Sikh pogrom that raged unchecked for nearly three days across several parts of India, but especially in New Delhi after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot dead by two of her Sikh bodyguards on the morning of 31 October 1984, ended only with her cremation on 3 November.

During these seventy-two hours, droves of Sikhs, including women and children, were hunted down and corralled by Hindu mobs on the streets, their homes and workplaces in the capital, and slaughtered like animals. Some Sikhs were even ‘necklaced’ by pinioning them with rubber tyres drenched in kerosene oil or petrol around their chests and arms and setting them on fire.[1]

By the time some semblance of order was enforced in the city by the Indian Army, the organized massacres had led to the killing of some 2,733 Sikhs in Delhi alone1—though human rights organizations put this number closer to 4,000.

Thereafter, a mix of some fifteen inquiry commissions, committees, and special investigation teams (SITs) over the following thirty-four years, determined variously beyond reasonable doubt that these killings had been engineered by Congress party loyalists.[2] These slayings were duly supervised, in many instances, by Delhi Police personnel. Yet, a token few of those eventually deemed guilty were convicted, and even fewer ultimately sentenced and jailed.

These probes also determined that the extended slaughter was executed by a cross section of largely Congress party minions along with their underlings, sympathizers, and especially dragooned bands of criminals. Reportedly carrying voter lists to identify Sikh households in Delhi neighbourhoods and armed with crude swords, scimitars, cleavers, scythes, kitchen knives, and even scissors, these groups executed their retribution without let or hinderance.[3] [4]

Significantly, the latter implement was wielded widely over these three murderous days to shear the kesh (hair) of thousands of Sikhs in a gratuitously sacrilegious and heretical endeavour at demeaning and humbling this proud and outwardly distinctive community, for whom uncut hair is one of the five symbols of their faith ordained by their tenth and last guru, Gobind Singh, in 1699. Kesh not only symbolizes faith for the egalitarian Sikhs, but also manifests the denial of all vanity and pride in their appearance.[5]

Justifying this slaughter, if such were possible, the assassinated prime minister’s son and political successor Rajiv Gandhi complacently declared at a public rally at Delhi’s Boat Club on 19 November that ‘Jab bhi koi bada ped girta hai, to dharti thodi hilti hai’—When a big tree falls, the earth shakes a little. The new prime minister had fittingly delivered the Congress party’s metaphor for the pogrom, even though in officialese and in media reports at the time—and even now—it continues to be euphemistically referred to as the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.[6]

And whilst unbridled chaos and mayhem proliferated unimpeded across the capital, the calculated slaughter of some 300 indigent Sikhs in the trans-Yamuna resettlement of Trilokpuri Colony in East Delhi was, without doubt, the most brutal. The charred and hacked remains of the hundreds that perished in Trilokpuri’s Block 32 over forty-eight hours between 1 and 2 November depicted an implausible tale of state-sponsored carnage, the memory of which continues to haunt me nearly four decades later.[7]

Face to Face

On the morning of 2 November, around 11.30 a.m., one Mohan Singh, who had sought refuge in our office canteen, told me and my Indian Express colleague Joseph Maliakan of the Trilokpuri massacre, which was then ongoing. He himself had shaved his head and beard only hours earlier. Terrified of the police and local officials, who were obviously complicit in these killings[8], he had feebly hoped that a paper like the Express may somehow, through its influential pages, assist in ending the bloodbath that had been raging uninterruptedly along two narrow, adjoining alleyways in Trilokpuri’s Block 32. Each of these lanes was no more than seventy metres long and five metres wide. They were lined with one-roomed tenements on either side that were inhabited largely by poor Dalit Sikh families, many of whose menfolk wove string beds for a living.

Vacantly, Mohan Singh told us how scores of Sikhs in Trilokpuri had unhurriedly been butchered in these twin streets by bands of sword, axe, and chopper-wielding men who went about their task with gory determination. In between their killing spree, they found time to rest and take breaks for meals, before resuming their butchery with renewed vigour.

Unlike Mohan Singh, there was also no possibility of any other resident of the two streets bolting to safety, as an impenetrable cordon of locals armed with lathis had girdled the area to block any runaways. Neither was there hope of succour from surrounding Hindu households in the colony, or from local police and block officials, many of whom, it later transpired, were in varying degrees of omission or commission complicit in the Block 32 slayings.

Almost immediately, along with Maliakan and Alok Tomar of Jansatta, the Express Group’s Hindi newspaper, we rushed to Trilokpuri—one of numerous resettlement colonies established in East Delhi during the twenty-one-month long Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975. The entrance to it was blocked by massive concrete pipes, with lathi-wielding men standing guard above. They stared menacingly at us but made no move to hinder our progress further into the labyrinth of Trilokpuri’s criss-crossing alleys, providing us the first indication that something horrific and sinister was underway within.

A short distance from Block 32, our way was blocked by a lathi-wielding mob, also armed with bricks and rocks. But before they reached us, two policemen astride a motorcycle burst through them, coming from the direction to where we were headed. We flagged them down. Has any unrest been reported in Block 32, we asked the head constable driving the bike.

Smiling mockingly, he said shanti (peace) prevailed in the area. However, on insistent questioning, he gruffly admitted that two people ‘may’ have died there. Before they could be quizzed further, they sped away. We did not realize it then, but over the next few days as we witnessed the mayhem in Delhi, mostly in East Delhi, a host of similarly conniving police officials would use the word ‘shanti’ to define the surrounding chaos.[9] We also did not comprehend at the time that these two policemen from the local Kalyanpuri police station were in reality a reconnaissance team for mid-level local Congress party functionaries[10] who had been tasked with determining whether the retaliatory Sikh killings in Block 32 were progressing as planned.

As we proceeded down the narrow brick-tiled road towards Block 32, our car was stopped by a mob that turned nasty and began stoning us when we asked to be let through. A spokesperson for the crowd, a short vicious-looking man dressed in a grubby white blood-splattered kurta and pyjamas, told us to leave or ‘face the consequences’ if we insisted on moving any further.

Block 32, he ominously said, was out of bounds.

Night of the Dead and Living Dead

[On our turn to Trilokpuri] around 6 p.m. on 2 November.

We walked wordlessly, as if in a trance, in the light of a few hurriedly procured hurricane lanterns, down the two alleyways littered with bodies and body parts. It was impossible to place one’s foot flat on the ground for fear of stepping on either a dismembered body or hacked head or limb, all of which were swathed with the kesh of the dead. Both lanes were awash with blood, most of it a black coagulated mass by now, over which flies and winter insects laconically buzzed. It could not even flow into the drains, inefficient at the best of times, as they too were choked with human remains and clumps of hair.

Halfway down the lane sat a young polio-afflicted mother on the doorstep of her two-roomed tenement tightly clutching her infant daughter in numb silence, all emotion drained from her face and sightless eyes. Her blank, uncomprehending gaze took us in unseeingly, in what we took to be a plea for help. And, as one of us bent down to lift up her child, her emotionless look momentarily changed to one of unmitigated terror, and her paralysed limbs too seemed to recoil in sheer panic and alarm.

Some doors down the same street, an infant girl, stepping over the bodies of her father and three brothers and countless others lying in the street, clung helplessly to one of us reporters, pleading mutely for assistance. ‘Please take me home,’ she wailed, standing uncomprehendingly, thigh-deep in corpses. There was nowhere for her to go. She was already home; but it was one littered with the bloated bodies of her parents and older siblings, killed and partially burnt several hours earlier.