The Sikh Forum, New Delhi, who worked closely with the victims families, detailed 3,870 dead in Delhi alone, while the government admitted to 2,733 deaths.
There is no doubt the official figures were grossly underestimated. The killings on the trains, buses and on roads and also those murdered in Kanpur, Bokaro and other towns, cities and villages throughout India were not included in this toll. In addition, bodies were rapidly disposed of by cremation in mass graves in the outskirts of Delhi to minimise the loss, as stated by eyewitnesses.
Between 6,000 and 8,000 dead in Delhi alone
Romesh Thapar, editor, Seminar.
Illustrated Weekly of India, 23-9 December 1984. p12.
The figure of 10,000 Sikhs killed (more than half of them in the capital) would not be an exaggeration.
Khushwant Singh, author.A History of the Sikhs. Second Edition. Volume II: 1839-2004. Oxford University Press. 2004. P379.
It will not come as a surprise that a government intent on committing acts of terror against its own people will have an incentive to hide the truth. From the outset, the dead of November 1984 were never properly counted. Indeed, there was a deliberate strategy to hide the extent of the massacres.
‘Total death toll may never be known’.
Indian author Amitav Ghosh and a witness to the 1984 events.
One thing we do know is that the official declarations of deaths were nothing short of farcical. On 1 November, the home secretary stated that the number of people killed in the entire country was just ten, including five in Delhi. This was the same day that journalists had stumbled across the corpses of 400 Sikhs in East Delhi.
The next day, the capital’s police commissioner asserted that ‘fifteen, maybe twenty people have died in violence during the day’. To this, the governor added his voice, saying that ‘things are under control’. These words of reassurance came at a time when the likely number of deaths was already running into the thousands.
Five days later, the home ministry released a revised figure of 599 dead. According to the journalist Romesh Thapar, the home secretary ‘spent his active hours minimising what had happened and criticising “exaggerated accounts”’. On 11 November, the Hindustan Times published a table giving the official number of those killed in Delhi as 325.
It took three years for the Delhi Administration to conclude the official death toll – of 2,733 – when the Ahuja Committee submitted its report in August 1987. But even this would prove to be an understatement.
The official count overlooked the attacks committed on trains, buses and in taxis, let alone the wider massacres across India. Journalists who were present at the kill zones of Kanpur, Lucknow and Ghaziabad estimated that thousands were murdered in those cities alone. Also unaccounted for were those butchered in remote villages far from any media gaze.
The destruction of evidence has also obscured the real figures. Targeted incinerations would have resulted in more deaths than injuries. And in cases where whole families and communities were wiped out, no one would have been left to record their deaths, let alone file criminal cases or make a claim for recompense.
Victim testimonies also indicate a division of labour amongst the gangs, whereby people not involved in the killings were tasked with disposing of what was left of the dead. One survivor reported seeing bodies being collected up, doused in oil and set ablaze in the streets. Another saw half-burnt corpses being unceremoniously shoved into gunny sacks and taken away in three-wheeler auto rickshaws. In some parts of the capital, street sweepers removed the dead. Witnesses observed bodies piled up amongst the city’s garbage and hauled away in trucks.
Maxwell Pereira, one of the few police officers who actually saved Sikh lives during the atrocities, told a reporter that he saw ‘a mountain of bodies’ when at a Delhi morgue. There were ‘half burnt [and] fully burnt bodies piled one on top of the other’.1
Shyam Bhatia, a staff reporter at The Observer, received an anonymous phone call at his hotel on the night of 1 November informing him that dead bodies were being dumped at Subzi Mandi, a vegetable market in Old Delhi. He and his colleague, Robin Lustig, jumped into a taxi provided by the hotel and headed off into the deserted streets to investigate. When they arrived they noticed a makeshift mortuary adjacent to the vegetable market. Peering through the high metal railings they saw scattered about its grounds small bundles of rags. Bhatia climbed over the metal railing to take a closer look. Proceeding further he tripped over some burnt tyres, a portentous sign of what he was soon to discover – the bundles were charred Sikh corpses. Some still donned partially burnt turbans. Bhatia managed to count 119 bodies before being overwhelmed by the smell of smoke and burnt flesh. The journalists then noticed what appeared to be a green army lorry parked nearby with its back open. On closer inspection he found approximately thirty Sikh bodies piled up. ‘It was impossible to sleep the rest of that night,’ he would later recount, ‘and despite repeated hot showers, the stench refused to leave.’2
Little or no doubt remains that the police were complicit in this gruesome logistical process. Evidence suggests that they helped transport bodies in trucks and vans to the outskirts of the capital and other cities to be done away with in mass cremations. One survivor claimed that the police had collected bodies from different parts of the city using up to 120 trucks in which they ‘piled them [the bodies] one on top of the other and took the bundles to the forests on the outskirts of Delhi and Aravalli Hills surrounding Delhi to set the lots on fire with the help of petrol, diesel or other chemicals’.3
Several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) conducted their own investigations into the death toll. Their findings ranged from 3,870 in Delhi alone4 to a national death toll exceeding 3,000,5 with the proviso that the actual toll was likely double this figure.6
In 2013, an article in The Economist stated that at least 8,000 Sikhs were killed nationwide, half in the capital.7 But even this may be an understatement – a US-based NGO, Sikhs for Justice, quoted official Indian government figures showing a staggering 35,000 claims filed by the victims (albeit they may include injuries and damage to properties in addition to deaths).
Within weeks of the massacres, Maneka Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s estranged daughter-in-law, made several damning statements in an interview with Time magazine’s South Asia correspondent. The widow of Sanjay Gandhi who was raised in a Sikh family, she reportedly laid the blame for the bloody aftermath of the assassination on her brother-in-law, Rajiv. She went on to dismiss what was then the official death toll of 601 as utter nonsense8:
While the figures will continue to be debated, the atrocities that gave rise to them are beyond contention. And the methodical manner by which the dead were disposed of could not possibly have been organised within a day of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination on 31 October. As with the other harrowing aspects of the attacks, it is impossible not to contend that they must have been organised weeks, possibly months, in advance.
How many died during the 1984 Sikh Genocide?
Tweet
- Sanjay Suri, 1984: The Anti-Sikh Violence and After, 2015, p 110 ↩︎
- Shyam Bhatia, Bullets and Bylines: From the Frontlines of Kabul, Delhi, Damascus
and Beyond, 2016, p 41; Robin Lustig, Is Anything Happening?: My Life as a Newsman, 2017, Chapter 9: The Observer. ↩︎ - ‘Babbar on 84’, Youtube, posted by ‘Sikh Channel Delhi Unit’, 13 February 2014. ↩︎
- Citizens Justice Committee, quoted in the Ahooja Committee Report, 1986. ↩︎
- Who are the Guilty? Report of a joint inquiry into the causes and impact of the riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November 1984. Peoples Union of Civil Liberties and Peoples Union of Democratic Rights. November 1984. ↩︎
- Pranay Gupte, Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi, 2009, p 77. ↩︎
- ‘Narendra Modi: a man of some of the people’, The Economist, 18 December 2013. ↩︎
- Dean Brells, ‘After Indira’s death, her daughter-in-law Maneka hungers to head the Gandhi. ↩︎