Rape and sexual assault are a recurring aspect of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The Armenian Genocide, for example, was characterised by the rape of women and children by Turkish mobs, often in the presence of male family members, with the intent to demoralise and humiliate.
In India in 1984, rape was similarly central element of the violence from the onset. However, the relative lack of attention that has been paid to it in both unofficial and official accounts stems largely from the social stigma attached to sexual violence in India.
Furthermore, 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.
In 2006, filmmaker Reema Anand recorded testimonies that confirmed not only the targeted killing of men and boys but also of mass rape and killing of women and girls. Some suffered horrific injuries from being cut up or burnt. Witnesses spoke of seeing naked bodies dumped in trucks and driven away.1
Harrowing testimonies from survivors speak of their unimaginable horror. Cases were reported of women being stripped and raped while their husbands and sons were forced to watch. Children were often present while their mothers and sisters were being repeatedly brutalised. Some of the sexual violence was committed in the presence of the still smouldering corpses of murdered family members.2
The gang rapes were efficiently organised and planned. Much of the sexual violence was carried out reportedly on the instructions of local Congress leaders.3 Sikh men were also subject to sexualised humiliation, being forced to watch their wives, daughters, and sisters raped before they themselves were killed.
On 1 November, one forty-five-year-old woman was with her husband and three sons at their home in Block 32 of the Trilokpuri colony when they were viciously attacked around noon by a gang of approximately eight teenagers. That morning the family had been watching the television coverage showing scenes outside Teen Murti House, the former residence of Jawaharlal Nehru, where Mrs Gandhi’s body had been brought to be kept in state until her funeral. Hearing the mob at work outside, the father ran outside with the two eldest sons. They came under attack and were burnt alive. The woman’s youngest son, who had remained inside with her, pre-emptively cut his own hair and shaved his beard to avoid being identified as a Sikh. But when the gang entered the house he was still targeted. As his mother tried to shield her only surviving son, she was herself violently stripped naked and raped by boys she would later describe as being no older than fourteen or sixteen. Her son tearfully begged for them to stop, pleading that they should look upon her as they did their own mothers, but they carried on regardless.
When they finally left, the woman still feared for her son’s life and so she decided to look for sanctuary away from the house. They went outside and sat among a group of women. But the son was soon recognised and dragged away to a street corner where he was beaten with staffs before being sprinkled with kerosene. As he reeled from the blows the mobs set him alight. The mother tried to save her son but she was beaten back, sustaining knife wounds and a broken arm.4
Also, in Trilokpuri, a gang comprising mainly of teenagers taunted a group of Sikh women by insisting that their menfolk were dead so they should present themselves outside in a group or they too would be killed. The women and girls helplessly huddled together and were offered some water. As they were drinking the girls were dragged away, one by one, to a nearby mosque and gang-raped. Some returned from their ordeal, others did not.
One young girl said that she was raped by fifteen men. Another woman who tried to intervene to save her children was gang raped by around a dozen men and spoke of being bitten all over her body.
At the height of the Trilokpuri massacres, in which no Sikh man was left alive, some thirty women and girls were abducted and held captive in Chilla, a village two kilometres to the west of the capital. When the army eventually arrived on 3 November, some of the women were returned but many were not – they were either killed or remained as captives, their fate unknown.5
A woman, whose family had moved to Delhi from the newly created Pakistan at the time of Partition in 1947, would later identify the leader of the mob that killed her eighteen-year-old son as ‘the Congress-I block pradhan’ or neighbourhood leader.6 Some of the killers were from the same area and others from nearby villages. She recounted her ordeal:
The women were horded together into one room. Some of them ran away but were pursued to the nearby nallah [alley] where they were raped. Their shrieks and cries for help fell on deaf ears. From among the women held in the room, the hoodlums asked each other to select whomsoever they chose. All the women were stripped and many dishonoured.
Citizens’ Commission, The Sikri Report, 1985.7
The woman who related this account was herself raped by ten men. Their savagery satisfied, they told the women to leave, still naked to add to their shame.
In Sultanpuri in the west of the capital, another woman identified local Congress leaders spearheading the mobs on 1 November. In an affidavit she claimed that after her menfolk had been killed, they grabbed hold of her daughter and stripped her naked. This took place on the eve of her wedding day. She was abducted and returned home only after being violated for three days.8 In another case, a young girl was unable to remember who she was, so brutal was the attack she endured. One survivor testified that girls as young as nine to ten were raped.9
On 2 November, a medical officer from Guru Nanak Hospital in Kanpur visited a relief camp. She came across at least thirteen cases of girls and women aged between sixteen and twenty who had been gang-raped on the orders of the local Congress leader.10 In another incident in that city, two sisters, one of whom was pregnant, were raped in the street. Before leaving, their assailants poured acid over their bodies.11 Interviews recorded by human rights activists at other relief camps revealed a similar pattern. The trauma led to several of the victims taking their own lives, either during their stay at the camps or in the months and years to come.
Elderly women were also subjected to sexual assaults in front of their families, especially in Trilokpuri.12 In Nand Nagri, an eighty year-old woman informed a social worker that she had been raped. As in all such situations, the major purpose of these vile attacks was clearly to inflict maximum humiliation in order to completely destroy the victims’ morale.
In a complete dereliction of duty, the government provided no physical protection to the victims, nor did it make any arrangements for them to reach safety. Furthermore, the local administration did little to create an environment where victims of rape could record their ordeal or testify. Many, if not most, cases went unreported – those who suffered wanted their shame to remain buried deep within the cinders of their homes.13
The impact of the hideous crimes committed against these women would remain forever more, with devastating consequences not only for their life outcomes but also those of their surviving children. A culture of lifelong and intergenerational suffering had been born.
No cases of mass rape were highlighted by the Misra Commission, first government-led inquiry. The 2005 commission of inquiry, led by Justice G.T. Nanavati, disregarded the sexual violence testimonies submitted by social workers.
The denial of rape and sexual violence was even echoed by a leading American philosopher of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, Professor Martha C. Nussbaum, when she made the erroneous claim in 2007 that ‘rape and killing-by- incineration were not central elements of the violence’.14
To date, no one has been convicted of sexual violence and rape against Sikh women and girls.
See also: Unprecedented Sexual Violence in 1984. Pav Singh. Velivada.
- Gurcharan Singh, ‘Scorched White Lilies of ‘84’, review in Institute of Sikh Studies, January 2011. ↩︎
- Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gangster Rule’, Manushi, 1985. ↩︎
- India: No Justice for 1984 Anti-Sikh Bloodshed, Human Rights Watch, 29 October, 2014. ↩︎
- Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gangster Rule’, Manushi, 1985. ↩︎
- Manoj Mitta and Harvinder Phoolka, When a Tree Shook Delhi, 2007, p 68. ↩︎
- Citizens Commission Sikri Report, S. M. Sikri, Badr-un-Din Tyabji, Rajeshwar Dayal, Govind Narain. T. C. A. Srinivasvaradas. January 1985. ↩︎
- ibid. ↩︎
- Affidavit of Padmi Kaur, Sultanpuri submitted to Misra Commission, 1987. ↩︎
- Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gangster Rule’, Manushi, 1985. ↩︎
- Jaskaran Kaur, Twenty Years of Impunity, 2006, p 38. ↩︎
- Affidavit of Sarabjeet Singh, cited in ibid. ↩︎
- Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gangster Rule’, Manushi, 1985. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎
- Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, 2007, p 23. ↩︎
Unprecedented cases of rape and sexual violence during the 1984 Sikh Genocide.
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