The intensity and horror of the massacres were such that they have largely overshadowed the sexual assaults that, in themselves, amount to a mass crime against humanity. The gang rapes were efficiently organised and planned. Much of the sexual violence was carried out on the instructions of local Congress leaders. Sikh men were also subject to sexualised humiliation, being forced to watch their wives, daughters, and sisters raped before they themselves were killed.
A dazed mother and her children, survivors of a devastating massacre in the Kalyanpuri colony in East Delhi, sit amidst the rubble of what was once their home in Sector 13. Photographer Ram Rahman.
Sikh men and boys often had their unshorn hair cut by the mobs as a form of public humiliation and religious desecration. Here, a mother holds her murdered son’s shorn hair and identity card. Photographer Ashok Vahie.
A blood-drenched shirt is what’s all that’s left of a family member. Photographer Ashok Vahie.
Jassa Ahluwalia, Actor, author and trade unionist. Reading from 1984 India’s Guilty Secret
Very few men survived the massacre at Trilokpuri. Those who did were inconsolable to the tragedy that had taken place. Photographer Ram Rahman.
‘In some of the worst-hit localities like Trilokpuri and Kalyanpuri in east Delhi, where entire communities had been wiped out almost to a man, the refugees sent from camps to their homes, came trickling back. It was unthinkable that the survivors could be expected to go back and take up their lives again in the midst of their very assailants’.
A mother from Trilokpuri holds a dismembered finger, the only remaining part of her butchered son. Her remaining children bear witness. Photographer Ram Rahman.
In the aftermath of four days of onslaught, Sikh survivors, dazed and traumatised women and children found themselves in a state of utter destitution, with a state administration that were indifferent to their plight. Photographer Madhu Kishwar.
Refugees in their own country: a Sikh family in a school yard are served by a langarwalla in one of several makeshift relief camps in Delhi, 5 November 1984. Bettmann/Bettmann/Getty Images.
In the resettlement colonies outside Delhi, it was the poor that bore the brunt of the genocide. Photographer Ashok Vahie.
Some of the burn and injured victims in 1984 anti-sikh massacres in New Delhi. Photographer Sondeep Shankar.
Poonam Muttreja, one of the social workers who helped widows at Trilokpuri, women whose husbands had been killed and their houses burnt and looted. Rajiv Gandhi – The Alternative Report by Prabhu Guptara. Courtesy Channel 4.
A Widow of 1984 anti-sikh massacres with her child born on the night of the carnage in Nand Nagri in East Delhi. Photographer Sondeep Shankar.
Eastern Eye. Presented by Aziz Kurtha and Jaswinder Bancil. Report on the Trilokpuri massacre including interview with author Khushwant Singh. January 1985. Courtesy London Weekend TV.
Some of the women of all ages who had become victims of mass rape and their children found some safety in these camps. Many families were eventually resettled in the Widow’s colony of Tilak Vihar in West Delhi where they tried to build their lives. However, inter-generational trauma would become a feature of these communities. Photographer Ashok Vahie.
‘It is not only police apathy in action and absence during the riots, but the entire conduct of the police and the government after the riots which confirms a total lack of concern of those killed’.
Shiv Narayan Dhingra, Additional Sessions judge.
Survivors protesting about their conditions in the camps, weeks on from the massacres. Photographer unknown.
‘The widows were in a perpetual state of mourning, so absorbed in their own grief. Yet nobody was paying attention to the children… One of the boys was so psychologically scared that he would ascend to the rooftops and threaten to jump, screaming in desperation for the man who killed his father to be found. For many of the widows life became too much to bear. Some gave up their lives by plunging into the Yamuna River, while others simply became destitute’.
Professor Swaran Preet Singh, quoted in ‘1984 India’s Guilty Secret’.
In Memory of Friends (Una Mitran Di Yaad Pyaari). Produced by Anand Patwardhan. 1990.
The hopeless state of the surviving mothers and girls, their images captured in the many refugee camps that sprung up after the carnage. Photographer unknown.
The police were largely spectators in the face of the violence at best, and active participants at worst. Photographer Ashok Vahie.
Only after three full days, when thousands had been killed, maimed, raped and displaced did the army actively step in. Despite this, sporadic attacks would continue. Photographer Ashok Vahie.
With the constant barrage of attacks on the Sikh community in local, state, and national discourse during and after the massacres and in the run-up to the general election, it was only inevitable that members of the general public would begin to openly express their hatred.
‘Children threw rotten food into my home while my work colleagues joked about the massacres; “These people should be grabbed by their top knots, whirled around and beaten up thoroughly’. Others shamelessly gloated about seeing Sikh gurdwaras consumed by flames and how they had ‘taken out the Guru Granth Sahib, spat [on] it, and urinated over it”.
Prakash Kaur, a Punjabi teacher at Delhi University
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s speech following the massacres (19 November, Delhi Boat Club)
The Prime Minister presented his casual justification for the mass murder of thousands of his fellow citizens: it was a natural phenomenon, spontaneous and tragic. but only to be expected and nothing of any greater consequence. When they came to kill Lakhwinder Kaur’s husband, she was an eighteen-year-old mother of a five-month-old daughter and two months pregnant: “It seemed easy for Rajiv Gandhi to say, When a giant tree falls, the earth below shakes. Our trees were felled and we can still feel the tremors.”
