The carnage in the wake of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination was by all accounts the worst independent India has seen. Politically instigated mobs went berserk arid brutally massacred hundreds of innocent Sikhs. Veena Das, sociologist, R K Das, economist, Manoranjan Mohanty political scientist, and Ashis Nandy, social psychologist, rediscover communal violence as a political strategy in the context of the Delhi riots. In such politically engineered riots, they argue, the victims are substitutable and could even be incidental.
First published in The Illustrated Weekly of India. 23 December 1984.
The anti-Sikh riots in Delhi in early November 1984, went on for four consecutive days. They showed a differentiated pattern, both in terms of localities and in terms of the timings of the events which took place. Yet, on the whole, the riots were in continuation of the anti-Muslim riots which had taken place a few months earlier in Bhiwandi and Hyderabad. All these riots, but specially the last two, fall in the category of riots engineered for political purposes.
Riots in recent decades have always been at least partly organised affairs. But in Delhi, probably for the first time, such engineering went totally out of baud. And the organisation and the leadership of the riot became all too obvious to the concerned citizens’ voluntary groups and protesting civil rights activists. This in turn led to blatant threats from the leadership of the ruling party and embarrassed silence of much of the opposition, unwilling to lose the so-called Hindu vote. In other words, the riots managed either to recruit or to immobilise most of the mainstream political parties and politicians. It was mainly the growing power of peripheral political and quasi-political groupings and the politically aware citizenry which stood up against the carnage.
Simultaneously, the riots revealed for the first time – perhaps because of the way the non-Sikh neighbours and, more importantly, non-Sikh neighbourhoods had in many cases come out against the riotous mobs — that a communal riot can not only be organised in connivance with the state and its various organs of the state (such as the police, the administration and the legislators) but a communal riot could paradoxically cease to be a proper, inter-religious conflict. In fact, such riots could become, in their new incarnation, a political ploy in which communal passions are deliberately aroused only in a small target section of the population which then becomes the instrument and the political con- sequences of such arousal are taken into account by hard-headed political leaders. It was the science of management at its ‘best’.
We have come a long way from the partition riots of 1947. The two cases that we have studied in detail exemplify the pattern of rioting in the resettlement colonies of Delhi. These are the colonies where the Jhuggi dwellers in the city were pushed during the Emergency. Their forcible eviction into these colonies was never followed by any attempt to organise community health or welfare. The result was that, whereas the social relations they had developed in the mixed neighbourhoods where they had lived earlier were broken, new relations that could sustain their social and moral life never developed. In addition, the caste com- positions of these neighbourhoods were such that they were almost exclusively made up of lower castes such as Lohars, Buniyaras, Chamars and Churhas who had neither the patron-client model available to them in villages through which distance and hierarchy are mediated, nor had they evolved new modes of interaction which could have reduced the tensions and competition typical of the caste divisions de- scribed here.
The urban policy of separating the two Delhis — one prosperous, upper- caste, middle or upper class, consisting of professional and business groups and the second consisting of the poor, low-caste, semi-skilled or unskilled servicing sectors — has led to a morphological pattern where the culture Of crime and poverty has found a natural organisation in the second Delhi. This organisation has been used in recent years for the criminalisation of politics and ‘quick-money operations’. Even, when these second-Delhi communities have developed some social linkages and a semblance of shared community life, it is easy to bypass the linkages and shared sense of community by using the criminal elements of some other locality against a target community at the time of social tensions and violence.
This background explains much of the difference between the riots in middle and upper class localities and the riots in the resettlement colonies. On the evening of October 31. following the news of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination, organised mobs went about attacking and beating up individual Sikhs whom they found on the roadside. A few of these mobs consisted of groups that had spontaneously collected at various places when Mrs Gandhi lay dying at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. They showed the anger of the kind that followed the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and led to the attack on Maharashtrian Brahmin households.
But already around the AIIMS many of the attackers had been armed by a Congress(l) member of the Metropolitan Council and the nature of the mobs had begun to change once they sensed government support and patronage. Nevertheless, one still suspects that had the mobs been controlled even at this stage, the casualties would have been few.
It was only on November 1 and 2 that the sporadic incidents of violence developed into systematic attacks on the economic base of the Sikhs and into an organised orgy of violence and murder. Eyewitnesses say that bus- loads of people were brought from Haryana though the borders of Delhi were supposedly sealed. These imported gangs came, looted, burnt, killed and then dutifully went back to their buses for the journey back to Haryana. The villages surrounding Delhi peopled many of these mobs but the leadership to them was allegedly given by a few MPs and members of the Metropolitan Council of Delhi. The lumpen elements of the resettlement colonies, who had earlier provided the busloads of ‘supporters’ for a variety of mainly pro-regime rallies since the days of the Emergency were under the command of their usual leaders this time too. They provided the second army of the rioters.
These mobs went on a rampage for the whole morning of November 1, systematically burning Sikh shops, factories, and other commercial establishments. In the upper or middle class localities these attacks did not always lead to the loss of Sikh lives. As soon as neighbours realised what was happening, they began arrangements to collectively defend the Sikh families among their midst. At the community level defence committees were formed, to defend the locality from outsiders. At the individual level Sikh families were given shelter by Hindu, Muslim, and other non-Sikh neighbours. That is why in these localities, the casualties mostly resulted from attacks on individual Sikhs found on the roads. However, in a few upper and middle localities houses were identified, attacked and people killed in dacoity-like operations; in some others, Sikhs could not be saved from well- organised, frenzied, large mobs.
The worst sufferers of the attacks were the poor in the resettlement colonies where the killers and looters carried out their operations on November 1, 2 and 3. In these colonies, the mobs were led by the local politicians and the criminal elements of the neighbourhood. Witnesses describe how a mob would go from house to house, call out the names of each person and drag him down to be hit, doused with kerosene, and burnt. Thus, it was not outsiders but some neighbours who led the attacks, killed, and helped the mobs to loot or burn.
However, among the poor Sikhs, the worst victims were those who were a little more prosperous as a result of employment in the Gulf countries. For instance, in Sultanpuri, the scene of one of the worst carnages of the city, the blocks which were most seriously affected were A-4 and C-4 blocks which housed the relatively more prosperous among the Sikhs.
The kind of ‘engineered riot’ mat. Delhi witnessed raises a number of political and moral issues:
The first and the most important point to remember is that the victims of engineered riots are always substitutable. The Sikhs were attacked in these riots by the machinery of terror that has been built up in the city. The goondas who did the killing and looting were not doing so because they believed in a particular ideology or because they were religious fanatics. They did so because the political bosses, who provided them protection during normal times against the implementation of law, had ordered them to attack a particular group. Mrs Gandhi’s death at most provided a vague justification to these criminal elements for what they had to do in any case. We feel that it is perfectly within the worldview of these politicians to engineer similar attacks on other groups, be they religious, ethnic or political. What has happened to the Sikhs and in the earlier riots to the Muslims can any day happen to South Indians, Marwaris, leftists, harijans, students or supporters of opposition parties. The machine has been built. It is only a matter, of time before it finds new victims.
Second, the law-and-order machinery in the capital of India was deliberately brought to a standstill for 48 hours, when the police, the administration and the army did not know about the appropriate authorities from whom orders could be received. Ordinarily the state con- fronts violence from a section of the people with more violence. Yet, in spite of the tremendous increase in the coercive apparatus of the Indian state in recent years, it remained silent and passive for three days while innocent citizens were being systematically killed. And since then the state has claimed insufficient coercive power for its inaction. (Almost all police officers of Delhi accused of collaboration with rioters or of direct participation in the riot have pleaded that they could not get reinforcements.) Evidently, the fabulous increase in the size of the ‘law-enforcing forces’ in recent years has diminished, not increased, the security of the citizen.
Third, the manner in which the autonomy of institutions has been eroded can be witnessed in a crisis such as this. Though even relatively low-level officials of the state are legally permitted to declare curfew, no one dared to do so in Delhi in the first two days of rioting because their superiors did not.
The Congress(I) has been marked by its attempts to identify the party with the state. Since the riots, all the criticisms of the party have been interpreted as criticisms of the state and it has been subtly implied that any condemnation of the Congress(I) amounts to the abdication of one’s duty as a citizen. The image of the state that was projected by the official media during the riots also equated the state with tire ruling party. As a result, even simple condemnations of the riots have been sometimes frowned upon. Even sectors not directly under the control of the government have internalised this new formula and opted for self- censorship. In two of Delhi’s premier women’s colleges, for instance, a majority of the faculty opposed moves to condole the death of the victims of the riot. The majority saw it as a highly political action.
Finally, the Delhi riots have once again underscored the responsibility of the intellectual community to generate data, act as reliable witnesses to events, and to give a voice to the victims. Not only have the majority of the middle classes fallen prey to government and press propaganda, they have, through a moral and intellectual sleight of hand, held the victims indirectly responsible for their suffering. On the other hand, it is an intellectual and moral failure of the intellectual community that we have not given a voice to the victims of violence in Punjab- be they the Sikh and Hindu victims of extremism or the Sikh victims of the engineered riots. Nor have the press or the creative writers tried to pierce through general propositions about Hindu-Sikh animosities and Sikh separatism and to restore the feel of the real-life suffering of real people, through studies of individual families and communities.
In spite of all that we have “said, the Delhi riots can be seen as an opportunity. Over the last decade the capital has become active in the area of civil rights and political nonconformism, thanks to a number of social, political and intellectual factors. These groups have come into their own after these riots. It has not been easy for the regime to sell them the packaged explanations of the riots as in the case of anti-Muslim riots elsewhere. Also, it was prob- ably a strategic mistake on the part of the local politicians to have an engineered riot in Delhi. This time it could not be explained away, as some of the anti-Muslim riots have often been explained away, as the result of the ancient blood-feud of two religious communities. Nor could it be easily explained away as a result of foreign or separatist conspiracies because most of the Sikhs in Delhi have been Congress(I) supporters and the links between the party and the riots have become all too obvious.
Even more encouraging is the fact that preliminary observations seem to suggest that the ‘refugee localities, having a first-hand experience of the 1947 holocaust, were conspicuously less violent. Often the Sikhs in these localities, were untouched. Though this phenomenon needs de- tailed study and conformation, it suggests that the suffering of the victims of this riot, too, may not be in vain.