Symbols of the Sikh faith became a favorite target of the mobs during the anti-Sikh massacres of November, transforming a politically and revenge motivated assault into a religious and communally hateful orgy of violence, aimed to inflict the maximum humiliation on India’s minority Sikh community.

Gurdwaras

To those responsible for directing the mob’s fury, it was imperative that certain images ‘had to be burned into the [Sikh] psyche’ forever.1 This necessitated the systematic targeting of Sikh places of worship known as gurdwaras, which had a centuries-old tradition of providing free food and sanctuary to the poor and the persecuted.

A gurdwara set on fire (image source unknown)

False rumours continued to be propagated to underpin and incite people to carry out attacks. Lies were spread that every gurdwara was an arsenal, apparently evidenced by the discovery of weapons kept under the temples by sympathisers of Sikh separatists – though no such weapons were ever found – and that Sikhs armed with swords were preparing night-time attacks against Hindus in which they would kidnap children.2

A large proportion of sworn affidavits and witness statements submitted to the official inquiries3 reveal gurdwaras were systematically attacked throughout Delhi and other towns on the morning of 1 November 1984.

A damaged gurdwara. Still image from ©ITN report.

Several were burnt down.4 In Delhi alone, more than 130 Sikh places of worship are believed to have been damaged.5 Hundreds more across northern India were hit in a manner chillingly reminiscent of the burning of synagogues during the 1938 ‘Kristallnacht’, the November pogroms in Germany.6

Gurdwara Rakab Ganj, a major shrine in the heart of New Delhi is only a few hundred yards from the nation’s Parliament buildings. It is historically significant as it commemorates the spot where the ninth Sikh Guru’s body was cremated following his execution by order of a Mughal emperor in 1675. On the morning of 1 November, it was repeatedly attacked by a mob, led allegedly by Congress MP, Kamal Nath, in the presence of several police officers, resulting in the death of two Sikhs.7

A mob mill around the entrance to the historic Gurdwara Rakab Ganj on the morning of 1 November before it was attacked. Still image from ©ITN report.

The Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee made the initial list of Gurdwaras in Delhi alone that were attacked on 31 October and 1 November 1984.8 In December 1985, in a submission to the Misra Commission, the Delhi Development Authority listed 120 Gurdwaras in Delhi that had been repaired following the attacks.9

Unshorn Hair

As gangs swarmed into Sikh houses, they often began their barbaric violence with a calculated physical and psychological gesture: the severing of male victims’ hair.

For observant Sikh males, their long, unshorn hair and beard stand as sacred markers of their faith, identity and history. Comparisons can be drawn with the plight of European Jews in the 1920s and 30s, whose beards and side-curls were also targeted in anti-Semitic attacks by both Polish and German troops.

The act of effectively ‘scalping’ their victims was intended to inflict maximum suffering and humiliation:

While their hair was cut, the mob jeered and mocked at them, chanting ‘mona mona mona’ [a person with short hair]; [the Sikhs] were ordered to keep dancing while the mob laughed wildly.

Amiya Rao, et al. Truth About Delhi Violence: Report to the Nation. New Delhi: Citizens for Democracy, 19858
A mother holding son’s shorn hair and identity card. © Ashok Vahie

Balwant Kaur of West Sagarpur was hiding in a building and could see through the holes in the wall how, before they killed, the mobs:

First caught hold of my brother-in-law, Gurnam Singh, then removed all his clothes except an underwear. Then they cut his hair (they had scissors with them).

Affidavit of Balwant Kaur submitted to the Misra Commission.9

Many Sikh men suffered the indignity of having to discard their turbans, cut off their long hair and beards, all acts of sacrilege that were enough to traumatise some for life. Some families desperately attempted to save their adolescent boys by disguising them as girls. This meant plaiting their long hair into two plats and dressing them in salvar-kameez, the traditional loose trousers and dress suit worn by women.

Evidence of discarded long shorn hair. Still image from ©ITN report.

Inder Singh of Trilokpuri came across the dead corpses of both his uncle and the local Sikh priest, Darshan Singh Granthi lying in front of the burnt gurdwara and described how

The hair of both had been tied together and one volume of [our] holy book was lying on their bodies in a burnt condition.

Affidavit of Inder Singh submitted to Misra Commission.10

Guru Granth Sahib

Also targeted were volumes of the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, hundreds of which were desecrated in public displays of hate. The renowned author and historian Khushwant Singh witnessed how copies of this sacred text raided from a house adjacent to his central Delhi apartment were thrown onto a bonfire in the street.11

Burnt copies of the Guru Granth Sahib. Still image from ©AP report.

When a Sikh priest was later interviewed about the burning of his shrine, his interviewer poignantly noted how ‘his deep hurt at finding that someone had urinated on the Sikh scriptures has perhaps not been captured in our translation’.12 

This is hardly surprising given the reverence in which the Guru Granth Sahib is held by Sikhs, who consider it their Eternal Guru, and primary source of enlightenment, direction and spiritual knowledge. The parallels with the desecration of Jewish Torah scrolls in Germany during the 1930s were disturbingly apparent.

‘Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.’

Heinrich Heine, poet, A Tragedy, 1821. 13
Burnt copies of the Guru Granth Sahib. Still image from ©ITN report.

Aftermath

Following the violence, tens of thousands of survivors sought sanctuary in the gurdwaras that were still standing. With the absence of aid from the administration, they stepped in to provide relief in the form of food, clothing and medicine for the victims.

With the constant barrage of attacks on the Sikh community in local, state and national discourse, it was only inevitable that members of the general public would begin to openly express their hatred. In one instance, Prakash Kaur, a Punjabi teacher at Delhi University, described how children threw rotten food into her home while her work colleagues joked about the massacres; chillingly they also expressed their feelings on how Sikhs should be treated:

These people should be grabbed by their top knots, whirled around and beaten up thoroughly.

Jaskaran Kaur, Twenty Years of Impunity, 200614

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’.15

Prakash Kaur recounted how a fellow Sikh bus passenger was humiliated with cigarette smoke – tobacco being a prohibited substance according to Sikh tenets:

The other day I was in a bus, which three young college students got into. One of them lit a cigarette and made sure that the smoke went right into the face of a middle aged Sikh travelling in the bus, blowing directly on to his face. The man sat there looking quietly sullen, choking his anger in the face of such a flagrant abuse.

Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar, The 1984 Archive.

Days after the killings, the stench of burning flesh still in the air, the situation was a source of amusement for some. A retired foreign office civil servant remembered his friend’s children telling him about the jokes that were doing the rounds in some of the elite Delhi schools: ‘What is a burnt Sikh? And the answer is – a seekh kebab’.16

In Germany after the war, many Germans would claim they knew nothing about the death camps. Disturbingly, in India, the burnings were not only common knowledge, they were celebrated.

  1. Dr Rajni Kothari, ‘Genocide – 1984: The how and why of it all’, Angelfire, 1994. ↩︎
  2. Amiya Rao, et al. Truth About Delhi Violence: Report to the Nation. New Delhi: Citizens for Democracy, 1985. ↩︎
  3. Official Government of India inquiries into the 1984 massacres. ↩︎
  4. Pranay Gupte, Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi, 2009, p 92. ↩︎
  5. When Gurdwaras turn first target, The Times of India, 2004. ↩︎
  6. Kristallnacht: A Nationwide Pogrom’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 9–10 November 1938. ↩︎
  7. See ‘Kamal Nath’ in ‘Perpetrators: Congress Party leaders. ↩︎
  8. Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee Arguments. Part 4. Submitted to Misra Commission. ↩︎
  9. Delhi Development Authority: Letter and List of Gurdwaras Repaired, December 1985. Appendix III. Jaskaran Kaur, Twenty Years of Impunity, 2006. ↩︎
  10. Amiya Rao, et al. Truth About Delhi Violence: Report to the Nation. New Delhi: Citizens for Democracy, 1985. ↩︎
  11. Affidavit of Balwant Kaur submitted to the Misra Commission. ↩︎
  12. Affidavit of Inder Singh submitted to Misra Commission. ↩︎
  13. Khushwant Singh, My Bleeding Punjab, UBS Publishers Distributors Ltd., 1992, p 92. ↩︎
  14. Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar, The 1984 Archive ↩︎
  15. Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy (1821), quoted in Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840, 2005, p 439. ↩︎
  16. Jaskaran Kaur, Twenty Years of Impunity, 2006, p 79. ↩︎
  17. Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar, The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation, 1987, p 90. ↩︎
  18. Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar, The 1984 Archive. ↩︎

Symbols of the Sikh faith, unshorn hair, gurdwaras and scriptures were a favourite target of the communally-charged mobs of 1984.