The violence was not just confined to the capital. Attacks were soon unleashed on the outer colonies around Delhi and further afield, wherever Sikhs were concentrated throughout the ‘cow-belt’ states of northern India and beyond.
The second most affected place after Delhi was the cosmopolitan city of Kanpur in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The attacks started at 7am on 1 November with groups from the south-eastern suburb of Jajmau vandalising Sikh shops and ransacking their home. The rapes and killings began in earnest when local Congress leaders allegedly took control. It was not until 4 November that the administration – whose district magistrate was accused of complicity in the violence1 – finally imposed a curfew to give relief to the beleaguered Sikhs.s.2
Equally intense was the violence that erupted in Bokaro Steel City and the Chas area in the Bokaro District of the eastern state of Bihar (now in Jharkhand). The small colony inhabited by Sikhs, many of whom were employed as technicians in steel plants, was razed to the ground by gangs made up mostly of local shanty-town dwellers. They were indiscriminate in their decimation of Sikh men and women.3 As in Delhi, Kanpur and elsewhere, Congress workers reportedly led the operation – their trademark white Ambassador cars were sighted alongside frenzied mobs, distributing supplies to them before and after the massacres.
Similar attacks occurred in states right across India. From Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh in the north-west, violence spread across the central northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, where close to forty towns were affected by the organised violence. Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west, and Bihar and West Bengal in the east saw outbreaks of violence, as did Maharashtra in the south-west. The barbarity even reached Assam in the remote north-east of the country.
A young girl from Bihar recounted how on the morning of 1 November, a large crowd, including some neighbours, marched to her house chanting anti-Sikh slogans. Armed with iron rods, axes, spears and firearms, they managed to break open the front door and dragged out her parents and three brothers, aged sixteen, twenty-five and thirty-two. She watched helplessly from a window in another neighbour’s house as her family members were each butchered in turn.4
The state of Haryana surrounds Delhi on three sides and shares its capital city, Chandigarh, with Punjab, the traditional homeland of the Sikhs. Waves of violence swept across the state, most notably in Pataudi, a town in the Gurgaon district lying approximately seventy kilometres south-west of Delhi. Mobs mobilised in the same fashion as elsewhere, following the sickening blueprint.
On the evening of 1 November the local gurdwara building was attacked. The following day, they targeted the Sikhs. Seventeen people were burnt alive in one incident. In another, two teenage sisters were dragged out into the street, stripped naked, beaten and urinated on before being incinerated alive. A witness to this ghastly scene was the Sikh gatekeeper of the local gurdwara, who had taken cover to save his life:
What role did these girls have in Mrs Gandhi’s assassination? Were we all responsible?’ I want my children to see what was done to us at the hands of our own people, in our own country. Before 1984, there were close to thirty Sikh families in Pataudi, but today there are only five. We, who chose to stay back, were forced to rise out of the sewers to rebuild our lives.
Gurjeet Singh, pradhan of Pataudi’s Gurudwara Singh Sahib.5
Nearby, the small community of Sikhs in the village of Hondh-Chillar, 100 kilometres south-west of Delhi, were attacked on 2 November by approximately 500 armed men transported from outside the locality in trucks. The mobs yelled ‘Sikhs are traitors, we will wipe them out’.6 Sikh men, women and children were torched alive in their homes and, according to survivors, several women were gang-raped during the ordeal.7
Yet it was not until January 2011, over twenty-seven years later, that the incident hit the headlines in India. The press reported how an engineer stumbled across the village, which had been deserted since 1984. At first, he did not know what to make of the bones that were lying scattered around. One of the burnt-out buildings displayed quotations from Sikh scripture on its walls, indicating that it had once been a gurdwara. The grim realisation soon struck him – he was standing amongst the remnants of skeletons in what was a mass grave. After the story hit the airwaves, the engineer was sacked by his employer – they denied their decision had anything to do with his discovery.8
Delhi
A month after the waves of attacks on Sikhs, the UK’s Channel 4 sent a film crew to report on the situation in East Delhi, one of the poorest areas to be affected. They followed the local Sikh community leader from house to house as he described how the massacres affected every Sikh family in the area:
In this house lived a scooter driver. He was beaten with sticks, his belongings were taken. Afterwards, he was brought out and set alight here. In this house, one man was killed. He used to be a porter at the local railway station. In the next house, another man was killed. He also used to be a railway porter. Here, his young brother was killed. He used to be a rickshaw driver. Finally, this is where my own brothers were killed, both set alight.
Eastern Eye, Channel 4. January 1985.9
The killings fields of the 1984 Sikh Genocide.
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- Manoj Mitta and Harvinder Phoolka, When a Tree Shook Delhi, 2007, p 81. ↩︎
- Devika Chhibber, ‘Rediscovering the phantoms of 1984’, Zee News, 7 November 2009. ↩︎
- ‘Chapter 12: Bokaro & Chas’, Misra Commission Report, 1987 ↩︎
- Miss Jasbir Kaur, Gammon Colony, ‘Affidavit’, Misra Commission, 1987. ↩︎
- Avalok Langer, ‘Riots in Pataudi. Not a whisper escaped’, Tehelka, 13 March 2011. ↩︎
- Ramaninder Bhatial, ‘Killers motive was revenge’. Times of India. 24 February 2011. ↩︎
- Sakshi Dayal, ‘1984 anti-Sikh riots, 32 years later: ‘They called my family out, burnt them alive’, The Indian Express, 30 June 2016. ↩︎
- I. P. Singh, ‘Man who exposed Hondh Chillar loses job’, The Times of India, 13 March 2011. ↩︎
- Eastern Eye report on the violence’, ITV, January 1985. ↩︎