Rahul Kuldip Bedi.
From The Assassination and After. Arun Shourie, Prannoy Roy, Rahul Kuldip Bedi, Shekhar Gupta. New Delhi. 1985. Reproduced courtesy of Roli Books.
Shortly after sunset on 1 November, the mob, busy in Block 32, Trilokpuri, East Delhi, dispersed for dinner. It had built up an appetite. Killing, burning and pillaging the 400-odd Sikh families in the Block had, indeed left them hungry. An hour later, their bellies full, they casually strolled back, to the two narrow lanes in the trans-Jamuna resettlement colony, forcibly plunged into darkness; to join those already hard at work.
Labouring at a leisurely pace they split open Lachman Singh’s skull and pouring kerosene into the gash set alight the half-alive man in front of Gyan Devi, his wife. Balwant Singh, who tried to escape after shaving himself, had his eyes gouged out before he too was similarly burnt. Sarb Singh, his terror-stricken father-in-law, watched. The sport continued, interspersed with solicitous visits
from the local police to ensure that things were going well.
The calculated carnage in Delhi and over 80 towns in the country had begun. The pattern was similar all over, the brutality unbelievable and barbaric, the tragedy unspeakable. It lasted four days and left over 1700 Sikhs dead, 1200 in Delhi alone, besides several hundred crores worth of property pillaged and gutted. It also left a volatile and proud community humbled and beleaguered. ‘Where do we go from here?’ is the unanswered question in the eyes of every Sikh, refugee or otherwise.
On 1 November all exit points from Trilokpuri have been sealed off by massive concrete pipes. Conscientious men from the colony, armed with lathis, guarded the pipes, barely a kilometre from two police stations – Patparganj and Kalyanpuri – to ensure that no Sikh escapes. Also, that no one except the police set foot into Trilokpuri.
Around 2 O’clock on 2 November, three newspaper reporters – Joseph Maliakan and myself, of the Indian Express and Alok Tomar of Jansatta manage to enter Trilokpuri. Just about the time that the killers, having toiled for 30 long and uninterrupted hours, were scouring Block 32 for booty or any young Sikh that inadvertently, they may, have overlooked. As if, around 350 Sikhs already killed and an equal number of looted and burnt houses was not enough. Besides the police, we three are the first non-residents to enter Trilokpuri since the assassination of Indira Gandhi two days earlier.
There is no need to ask directions to Block 32. As our car skirts the cement pipes we run smack into a miasma of hatred and tension. Following an almost tangible wall of shifty eyes and guilty visages, we turn to the fateful Block. Residents of other blocks lining both sides of the narrow street, watch impassively as we progress hesitantly towards Block 32, closing ranks behind us. Near Block 29, fifty yards from where the butchering is still in progress, the massive crowd parts, to make way for two constables from the Kalyanpuri police station, racing a motorcycle away from Block 32. The human wall seals off the Block after the policemen roar past.
Signalling the rider to stop, we ask what the situation is in Block 32. ‘Nothing to worry about. Only two people have been killed’, he shouts over his shoulder, barely stopping. The growl of the powerful motorcycle recedes into an eerie silence. A few yards further and our car is stopped. Arms akimbo, the mob closes in around us. A short statured man in his mid-30s, dressed in a kurta and pajama,
steps up and asks us where we are headed to. ‘Block 32 is that way’, he says, pointing in the opposite direction, the way we have come.
A brick sails through the air hitting the windscreen. It is followed by a barrage of stones. With a howl, the mob, drunk on the aphrodisiac of killing and pillaging, begins to close in. The omnipotent legend ‘Press’, boldly lettered on the front and rear of the car has effect. ‘Just leave’, the self-styled mob leader tells us. We do.
Ten minutes later at the Kalyanpuri police station, the duty officer, with a service revolver strapped to his side, tells us that nothing of consequence has happened in Trilokpuri. No deaths have been reported in the area which is under their jurisdiction, he claims.
A swarm of flies hovering over the back of a truck parked in the police station premises attracts us. Inside it lies half burnt, barely alive Tarseem Singh, lying atop several corpses, charred beyond recognition. He had come from Punjab to visit relatives in Trilokpuri and had been caught by the mob that morning, doused with kerosene and set afire. “The Station House Officer (SHO) sahib knows about these deaths’, says the duty officer, ‘but he is in Delhi since early morning in connection with some post-mortem case and will deal with them on return.’ It is evident that the police are too preoccupied with their ‘duties’. They have no time for Block 32.
Two army details we meet near Shakarpur around 3 O’clock, commanded by a Colonel and a Major respectively, promise to send help to Trilokpuri. However, till 5.30 that evening, no soldier has entered the beleagured Block. An armed contingent of Indian Air Force men on the ITO Bridge, led by a Squadron Leader, too refuse help. The officer has specific orders to clear the way for fledgling Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. A tow-crane precedes the IAF detail, clearing the way of embarrassing, tell-tale, burnt out vehicles.
For Delhi, according to its rulers, is ‘calm’ and relatively incident free on 2 November. Things, the then Lt-Governor, P G Gavai, says in an elaborate press note, are ‘under control’. And they want no evidence, which might disprove their claims, to be seen by their new Prime Minister.
A truck load of soldiers near the ITO Bridge across the Jamuna also decline to aid us by rushing to Trilokpuri. They have lost their formation and are in search of it. We are advised by this lot of soldiers to go up to the ITO flyover, where the army has a look-out post. The Second Lieutenant, with his wireless transmitter on top
of the flyover, is no lookout post. He too has lost his unit, stationed in Model Town in North Delhi and is trying to regain contact. ‘I have no orders to intercede in any emergency’, he says. He advises us to proceed to the adjoining Police Headquarters building. And 10-storeys of lawmen.
There, Nikhil Kumar, IPS, Additional Commissioner of Police, manning the ‘control room’ set up in the Police Commissioner Subhash Tandon’s office, calls the control room around 5 p.m., casually informing them that there is some garhbarh (trouble) in Trilokpuri. He returns to exchange casual banter with other callers. Half-an-hour later, accompanied by three reporters from the
Hindustan Times, we return to Block 32, Trilokpuri.
The palpable menace has eased but little. Three policemen, including Soor Veer Singh, the Station House Officer of Kalyanpuri police station, surveys the carnage, while residents from the neighbouring streets hang about in silent clusters.
A plume of smoke spirals upwards from half-charred bodies. Two lanes of Block 32, an area of around 500 square yards inhabited by around 450 Sikh families, is littered with corpses, the drains choked with dismembered limbs and masses of hair. Cindered human remains lie scattered in the first 20 yards of the first lane.
The remaining 40-yard stretch of the street is strewn with naked bodies, brutally hacked beyond recognition. Lifeless arms hang over balconies; many houses have bodies piled three-deep on their doorsteps.
“Take me away’, wails a three-year old girl, crawling from under the bodies of her father and three brothers and stepping over countless others lying in her one-roomed tenement, collapsing into the arms of a reporter.
‘What is our fault?’ whimpers a crippled mother, a polio victim, sitting in her doorway, surrounded by corpses, shielding her two-month-old baby. She makes us promise that we will guard her house after she left. She had bought television and new clothes just three days earlier. Kewal Singh, perhaps one of the few surviving young men of Block 32, has tied his turban round his stomach, slashed
open 24 hours earlier and gasps for water.
Slowly, survivors, mainly women and children, begin emerging from inside their homes. They are dazed, and without any emotion. They have no tears to shed.
“The Muslims are responsible for this carnage’, says Soor Veer Singh, nimbly side-stepping corpses. He is arrested an hour later for his complicity in the killings.
Back in the Police Headquarters, Nikhil Kumar justifies the absence of the police in Trilokpuri, despite earlier alerts by reporters, on the specious ground that he has performed his duty by informing the police control room. But so had Mohan Singh, the only one who escaped from Block 32 in the early hours of 2 November. ‘In any case’, Nikhil Kumar shrugs, ‘I am a guest artist here, on posting orders out of Delhi.’ The senior police officer also claims credit for informing the army Captain stationed inside the police control room, two floors above.
Hukam Chand Jatav, another IPS officer, Additional Commissioner of Police, says that he has just returned from a tour of the trans-Jamuna colonies, particularly Trilokpuri. Nothing is amiss. His Deputy Commissioner of Police, Seva Dass, IPS, has confirmed that all is quiet in the district.
Arriving in Block 32 well after sundown, the arrogantly complacent Jatav refuses to walk more than 15 yards down the corpse laden alley. ‘I have seen enough’, he says.
THE HAPPENINGS
The November riots, in Delhi and other parts of the country, were not a Hindu-Sikh phenomenon, fraught with communal overtones as is conveniently bandied about and accepted as a kind of fait accompli, consequent to the killing of a Prime Minister. The fact that hundreds of Sikhs were saved by their Hindu neighbours, often at great risk to their own lives, itself suggests the contrary. Nor were the riots the spontaneous reaction of a people mourning the assassinated Indira Gandhi, except for a few hours on 31 October 1984, the day she was killed. On this day, Sikhs were indeed beaten up by emotionally charged mobs and their properties and gurdwaras put to the torch in some areas.
No killings as an outcome of mob violence were reported in the country that day. The engineered holocaust needed at least a day to get organised. And there is enough evidence available to indicate complicity in the overall plot, complicity of the Congress-I, complicity of the police and complicity of local administrations.
The narrow confines of Trilokpuri merely confirm, without any shadow of doubt that the brutality perpetrated on the Sikhs, without let or hinderance for four days till 4 November was an orchestrated performance in which the conductors were the leaders of the ruling party and their minions. The phantom para-military forces and the instruction less army were nebulous figures in the background, never really sure of either their role or certain of their cue. They were shadowy figures with indistinct parts in the sordid pantomime.
The meticulousness with which it was organised bespeaks of a
definite plan, surfacing repeatedly in Saket, Bhogal, Jangpura,
Ashram in South Delhi before spreading to the trans-Jamuna colonies, the resettlement colonies in West Delhi and other areas in the
northern parts of the city.
Sultanpuri had been effectively sealed off by the police around 3 p.m. on the day after Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
Led by Congress-I pradhans and youth Congress-I leaders, mobs armed with voters lists began their putsch. The local police collaborated with the rioters, as numerous evacuees in camps swore afterwards in affidavits.
The Station House Officer, Hari Ram Bhatti, had allegedly shot dead Sunder Singh, the pradhan of the Sikh community. Kerosene was provided by the local grocer, a well-known figure amongst both communities. Mobs systematically set fire to every Sikh house. They dragged male Sikhs from their homes, shaved them (often at the police station), doused them with kerosene and burnt them alive.
Women clung on to their husbands and male children, all of whom were dragged out and killed. Young boys were saved by their mothers by dressing them in salwar-kameez. In the early hours of the following morning, the police disarmed and arrested the handful of Sikhs who tried to defend themselves with traditional weapons. The killings continued. Around 250 died. The pattern in Mangolpuri was the same. As were the number killed.
One family alone in Palam Village has 21 widows.
The story was repeated in other areas. Insouciant killers romped undisturbed, killing young Sikhs and assaulting young women. Numerous women were gang raped in trans-Jamuna colonies and in West Delhi. One such case was referred from the Shahdara Mental Hospital to J P Hospital – a young girl who had no clue to her identity, so brutally had she been ravished.
Many rape cases were referred to various hospitals in the city from refugee camps, but none were registered with the police at the insistence of the women. They wanted their shame to remain buried with the cinders of their homes.
Arson is a convenient weapon of organised violence. It leaves little evidence behind, should there, by any chance, be an investigation. At a conservative estimate over 2000 vehicles mainly trucks, were burnt. In Azad Mandi in North Delhi around 200 trucks, many with drivers inside them, were burnt. Over 300 factories were burnt in Noida, Okhla and the industrial areas of West Delhi. The
Campa Cola factory of the then Congress-I MP, Charanjit Singh, was also not spared. Even those Sikhs who belonged to the ruling party were guilty.
Trains coming into Delhi carried the gruesome evidence of violence from all over the country. Scores of bodies – the official toll is around 100- were removed from compartments, many more were burnt on railway tracks in Haryana and Rajasthan and on the periphery of the capital city of Delhi.
Even prestigious trains like the Pink City Express from Jaipur and the Rajdhani Express from Bombay were not spared. At Tughlaqabad railway station in South Delhi, at least five trains were stopped by a 300-strong mob and Sikhs pulled out and clubbed to death. Jawans of the Railway Protection Force simply looked away.
In the Congress-I ruled states in Northern India, the genesis of the violence was the same: sporadic and spontaneous incidents of looting, burning and beating of Sikhs; then the anti-social elements taking charge with organised leadership, and the police willingly failing to make their presence felt.
Let statistics tell their own tale.
One hundred and seventy-four people were killed in Uttar Pradesh of which thirty-one were non-Sikhs. Over a third of those killed were in Kanpur, the worst affected city in UP. The administration there let things take their course for a day before imposing curfew. Ironically, all senior UP police officers were in Allahabad
in connection with a freedom fighters conference to have been inaugurated by Indira Gandhi on 2 November! Looted property worth Rs 2.64 crores was recovered from the city where 1,820 people were arrested. Strangely, the towns most intimately connected with Indira Gandhi – Allahabad and Rae Barelli – were relatively peaceful. Three deaths were reported from both these places. The
Terai belt, where over 70 per cent of UP’s Sikh population live, was trouble free.
The steel town of Bokaro bore the brunt of violence in Bihar. Seventy-five people died here. The death toll in the state was 107. Here the killings were, probably motivated by economic factors, with prosperous Sikh contractors and businessmen being attacked by others. In Daltonganj, Sikhs retaliated with violence. Nine people were killed.
Violence in Madhya Pradesh was not concentrated in any one area but spread over nearly 40 towns including Indore, Bhopal, Jabalpur, Ujjain, Raipur (district), Gwalior, Raigharh and Mahendergarh and Bina, all places inhabited by Sikhs. Eighty-seven people were killed and over 5,000 persons arrested for arson
and looting. In Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, mob wrath was directed at Punjabi’s, not just Sikhs alone. To people in these states, the Sikh and the Punjabi are synonymous.
There are innumerable instances of Congress-I involvement in the riots. Hundreds of affidavits by refugees corroborate, time and again, how organised gangs of lumpen and criminal elements, living on the periphery of cities and in urbanised villages were garnered by local ruling party heavy weights, directed towards specific and selected Sikh targets and given a carte blanche; to indulge their most primeval instincts. Assured, of course, of immunity from the law.
The SHO of Subzi Mandi area, was transferred by H C Jatav on the evening of 31 October. He had arrested rioters and recovered looted property. His equally efficient successor was also moved to a refugee camp a few days later.
The government is quick to set up judicial enquiries even into minor fracas where merely a handful of deaths are reported. Are 1,700 deaths (or 795, with 95 in Trilokpuri alone, if one is to believe the official figure), too few for a judicial inquiry? The government’s refusal to set up a commission is an affirmation of its complicity. Do the guilty ever set up inquiries into their own guilt? Delhi’s new Police Commissioner S Jog has ordered an internal enquiry into the ‘conduct’ of the Delhi police during the riots, but thus far few changes have been affected on the field staff. The elections have saved them.
The People’s Union for Civil Liberties and the People’s Union for Democratic Rights are the only bodies to have brought out an exhaustive report on the riots Who are the Guilty – naming 227 people actively involved in the riots. These include 16 Congress-I MPs, Metropolitan Councillors, Corporators and Youth Congress I workers, 13 policemen besides the rest, residents of various
colonies.
A Citizen’s Enquiry Commission into the riots, too, has been set up with eminent public figures like S M Sikri, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Rajeshwar Dayal, former foreign secretary, Govind Narain, former Governor and B Tyabji, formerly of the ICS on it. Their report is expected sometime in January.
Riot victims have repeatedly confirmed that policemen, especially in Delhi, aided and abetted the rioters. And in practically every instance loomed the ubiquitous presence of ruling party politicians or their close supporters, directing operations from the frenzy’s edge. The casual, almost nonchalant ease with which Sikhs were butchered and burnt alive, their properties looted, and their religion defiled by forcibly shaving off their beards and hair, reveals a definite pattern to the atrocities. And one which cannot be explained away as mere acts of revenge against a community ‘riding high’ over the past three years, their ‘supremacy’ climaxing on the lawns of 1 Safdarjung Road at 9.18 a.m. on 31 October.
Facetious explanations preferred by certain officials – the government has given none and neither is it likely to and justified by an ever-obliging media, of absence of orders, inadequacy of manpower and a general paralysis of the system following the sudden death of Indira Gandhi, are pathetic in the extreme. Even in relief camps government aid when it finally surfaced was reluctant at
best. It was aimed, in some measure, at impressing foreign newsmen by a government sensitive to an image abroad. From 8 November onwards pressure began to build to empty these token refugee camps. Evacuees were paid fifty rupees and asked to leave the camps, to return to nothingness. Few political leaders visited these pockets of misery in the heart of Delhi. The Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, could rush to the site of a cyclone in Andhra Pradesh but was unable to visit even a single refugee camp in the city.
Compensation to riot victims, too, fell prey to the Catch-22 conundrum of officialdom which required the production of certificates and proof from an uncooperative, almost hostile administration, loath to either register cases of murder, arson or looting or issue death certificates. ‘Where is the body?’ was the stock question. ‘Cinders’, was not answer enough. Most of the refugees, despite grandiosely announced compensation schemes in the first flush of governmental activity, were grudgingly handed cheques for Rs 1000 and asked to leave. Many have now sought refuge in gurdwaras. The State has absolved itself cheaply.
The kaleidoscope of rioting and violence seems to fit a definite pattern when seen as a product of a politician-police nexus, both anxious to please their new bosses. Gore is an effective yardstick of loyalty. And the two assassins, were, after all, Sikhs. They were to be taught a lesson, long overdue.
Consider the facts as they unravel themselves. What took place between the afternoon of 31 October, when it was widely known that Indira Gandhi was dead, and the following morning, can be interpreted as a knee-jerk reaction, albeit ferocious. The release of pent-up emotions, a violent reaction to a violent death. Yet, it was restricted to arson and looting and, in Delhi, confined to a two-kilometre radius around the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), where Indira Gandhi’s body lay for over 12 hours, most of which time was spent in enacting the charade of keeping her clinically alive. Time spent in letting things deliberately deteriorate.
Police arrangements outside the AIIMS, where a huge crowd had begun gathering from around 10 O’clock in the morning, swelling till 9 p.m., when Indira Gandhi’s body was removed, were hardly adequate. Senior police officers seemed to have forgotten their basic training. Plans to deal with such crowds, went totally awry. A stream of burning vehicles stretched from the Prithviraj
Road Shah Jehan Road roundabout till the AIIMS, around 8 p.m. on 31 October. The motorcade of President Zail Singh, driving straight to the AIIMS from the airport shortly after his arrival from Yemen, was stoned by a huge crowd, restive since morning. A gurdwara in adjoining Laxmibai Nagar, the stronghold of Arjun
Das, a henchman of Sanjay Gandhi, and Member of the Delhi Metropolitan Council from the area, was set alight early in the afternoon, shortly after news agencies had confirmed Indira Gandhi’s death. Similar outbreaks spawned in various states particularly Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and to a lesser extent in Haryana, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, with sporadic incidents in Assam, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat.
Some misdirected Sikhs invited trouble by overtly expressing their joy at Indira Gandhi’s death. Some distributed sweets; others lighted diyas, saying ‘We’ll celebrate Diwali now’. Fired-up mobs were further incensed by Sikh house-owners who sought to defend themselves with guns and other weapons.
Gautam Kaul, IPS, Additional Commissioner of Police, dumbly stood outside the hospital where the body of Mrs Gandhi lay. He watched a group of youngsters stopping buses, dragging Sikhs out and mercilessly beating them up. “There is nothing I can do’, Kaul told me at the time, ‘I have to take her (Indira Gandhi’s) body home’. A red-eyed Kaul spent a major chunk of the following three days standing guard by the side of Indira Gandhi, his cousin, lying in state in Teen Murti House while mobs freely roamed his precinct, indulging in an endless orgy of murder, arson and looting, the like of which had not been seen since Partition. Kaul was ‘professional’ enough though, to ensure that over 10,000 policemen and para-military personnel guarded Teen Murti House and its environs in New Delhi area. VIPs from all over, in Delhi to attend Indira Gandhi’s funeral were to be guarded at the cost of hundreds of Sikh lives.
Gautam Kaul was at Teen Murti House till noon of 1 November, a fact amply corroborated by Doordarshan cameras. In the afternoon, according to the log, he visited the Rakabganj Gurdwara and the house of a colleague which was attacked by a mob on Mahadev Road. In the evening he attended meetings.
On 9 November, Gautam Kaul, who had done a long stint with the Bureau of Police Research and Development, besides spending a-year-and-a-half as the Delhi Police Public Relations Officer (PRO), was moved up to the coveted post of Additional Commissioner, Special Security. His dereliction of duty during the riot
days, when he rarely toured the carnage ridden colonies of Sultanpuri, Mangolpuri and Palam, in which around 400 Sikhs were killed, was rewarded. It was enough that he had performed well during guard duty and been constantly in the public eye.
According to the police log, Police Commissioner Tandon spent the day after the Prime Minister’s assassination alternating between Teen Murti House, Rashtrapati Bhavan and Raj Bhavan, before returning to his office in Police Headquarters. He left his office around 5.45 p.m. and toured a few areas in between the meetings he had to attend at the Home Ministry. With mobs ruling the capital by the evening of 1 November, what was discussed in these
meetings?
Sketchy details are available regarding the movements of Hukam Chand Jatav from the log, because, for some inexplicable reason, his wireless operator broadcast his locations infrequently and even these were not logged. The log, however, does record S K Singh, Deputy Commissioner of Police, North District, requesting Jatav, his chief, several times to visit Gurdwara Sisganj.
Under normal policing circumstances, whenever any kind of trouble is expected, the local law and order machinery is trained to confer and chalk out strategies to combat anticipated violence. Indira Gandhi’s death was not an ordinary happening. The identity of her assassins, considering the volatile situation in Punjab, made it doubly extraordinary. Besides, even granted, that the police were
sympathetic to an impromptu violent outburst, there was no reason for letting it spill over on to the next day. And the next, unless, of course, it was all planned.
Strangely, no meeting was called to prevent escalation of disorder in Delhi and other places, barring Calcutta and Agartala. Here the army was called out by early afternoon of 31 October and bloodshed averted. In Bombay too, which has a sizeable Sikh population, violence was confined to sparse pockets for a few hours. Nothing later.
Hence, over the next four days, the northern states experienced a bloodbath. Sikh travellers in trains were dragged out, doused with kerosene and burnt on station platforms. The country saw the dehumanised face of the calculatedly crazed state and its total reluctance to deal with the situation till the pyre of Indira Gandhi was lit on 3 November.
Impressive platitudes-calling in the army, indefinite curfew, shoot-at-sight orders issued were broadcast over the radio, flashed over television screens and headlined in newspapers for a week till 6 November. ‘Situation under control’ was another well flogged cliche during this period. Charred Sikh bodies all over the country and refugees with sightless eyes reliving the trauma of partition riots, disproved the state’s assertion of ‘control’ and ‘firmness’. As did crazed mobs, freely roaming the streets during indefinite curfew, booing the army trying to enforce it, without either the numbers or the authority to do so till it was too late.
‘Nobody was in town’, is the reply that continues to surface whenever an explanation is sought for the breakdown of the system on 31 October. The then Home Minister, P V Narasimha Rao, was away. So was the Cabinet Secretary, Krishna Swamy Rao Sahib. (Both were back by early evening.) But can only the very top echelons of government crank the wheels of the State to safeguard its
citizens? The State machinery, has over the years, prostituted itself to become to an extent, the devil himself. Amazingly, of late its normal response is to abet and perpetuate crime.
In any case Home Secretary, M. M.K. Wali, appointed Delhi’s Lt Governor on 4 November (shortly before he was to retire; he, too, had to be justly rewarded) when there was little left to salvage, was in the capital. So was Subhash Tandon. So was P.G. Gavai, the then Lt-Governor. Were they insufficiently equipped, either in authority or experience to handle the situation? Or have the state organs completely lost all ability to act? Has the devaluation of the services over the last decade or so, been so great that no officer can take decisions without seeking directives from ‘above’, making a mockery of all training and traditions? Or were they deliberately prevented from acting? Prevented in order to aid the ‘easing’ of pressure built up inside a government which had patronised Sikh fundamentalist
leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, but had to resort to Operation Bluestar, once he went out of control? Was action withheld so that the Hindu community, under ‘siege’ by the Sikhs for the past three years, could break out and with state help, assert itself? That, too, at a time when mass mobilisation of Hindus was an election asset.
It is true that Subhash Tandon, who spent many years in the Intelligence Bureau looking after VIP security, had little experience of policing. Even though Tandon owed his job primarily to the simple ploy of making sure that he was seen at least once a day by the late Prime Minister, on her movements around Delhi, he had no
reasons for not calling a meeting of district police chiefs and taking preventive steps, unless he was under specific instructions to do otherwise.
For had the Delhi police resorted to even perfunctory policing measures, with an exemplary show of force (which they are happy enough to show normally), particularly in West and East Delhi, so cowardly were the mobs, that there would have been little bloodshed. A classic example of mob cowardice manifested itself outside the taxi stand on Janpath, near the Sikh owned Imperial Hotel. As the mob advanced on the taxi stand, before hitting the Imperial, they were accosted by a line of Sardar taxi drivers, variously armed with car cranking handles, spanners etc. The mob by-passed the formidable’ obstacle, moving on to Connaught Place. Had Delhi’s 33,000-strong police force been mobilised, against faint hearted mobs who took to their heels seeing any car or jeep, killings could
have been averted. But only if the force in the 66 police stations had been deployed.
Few rounds were fired by the police on 1 November, and those too, by a handful of professionals still thankfully on the force. By the same evening, word had filtered downwards, that all those policemen shooting at mobs would run the risk of getting into trouble. Ironically, the police commissioner system, introduced to deal with such situations, empowers officers to open fire at their discretion. There was no firing worth the mention on 2 November either. It
began with enthusiasm only the following day. Eighteen people were shot dead by the police and an equal number injured. Too few for the numbers involved and the havoc wreaked.
Arun Nehru, MP, cousin of Rajiv Gandhi, took charge of the country at the AIIMS itself, while Indira Gandhi lay dead on the eighth floor in the operating theatre. Again, it was a measure of the total servility of our parliamentarians bowing to the dynasty, that no one questioned Arun Nehru’s credentials, which rested merely on kinship to both a dead and, by now, a prospective Prime Minister. Nehru met Rajiv at the airport after his arrival from West Bengal and was instrumental in hastening his succession, after which Indira Gandhi was officially declared dead. Nehru then assumed charge of the situation, as the Prime Minister was too preoccupied to attend to matters of governance.
A meeting of top Security and Intelligence Bureau officials was held on 31 October evening to chalk out the programme for Indira Gandhi’s funeral. Security arrangements for heads of state and other dignitaries likely to attend were discussed. Delhi’s law and order situation, or rather the lack of it, was not considered important or topical enough. It was left to the ‘initiative’ of the politicised local police stations.
But as window dressing, the government the same evening announced that the Central Reserve Police Force and the Border Security Force had been called out, as the local police had failed to control the situation in Delhi. The army, too, was ‘alerted’. Routine drills were being parroted. For the next three days, the only paramilitary forces visible were in the vicinity of Teen Murti House. On 1 November, when rioting began in real earnest all over Delhi, I saw one truck of BSF men in Chandni Chowk in the morning and four CRPF jawans huddling in the back of a truck late the same night, near the government housing colony of Lodi Estate, exempt from curfew. Other than these two places, para-military personnel usually on constant stand-by and normally air-lifted in anticipation of trouble to far flung areas, were absent. Not available to prevent rioting. A duty officer at the Nizamuddin police station, confessed on 1 November, that he had been begging both the CRPF and BSF control rooms to rush help to riot hit Bhogal, but they refused to respond. Citizens too fared no better.
Despite its avowed failure in containing the riots, the Delhi Police, continued to play a pivotal role in the city, remaining the main link between the army and riot-hit areas. All distress calls were made to the police control room, busy throughout the rioting period. Yet, nobody seems to have made contact. The police say their telephones were manned, yet thousands say no one answered them despite incessant ringing. The army, unfamiliar with the terrain, virtually had no say in operations, till the afternoon of 3 November, when there was little
left to protect. Even then, it had to ‘work’ in close tandem with the local police stations and was sent to trouble spots invariably after the mayhem was over. Imposition of indefinite curfew, too, was farcical. Mobs drove around at peak curfew hours, moving from one Sikh target to another, looting and burning. It was only after 5 November, when the army was eventually issued comprehensive instructions, that curfew was strictly enforced.
Creeping into all this marauding were under currents of economic disparity: envy of hard working and prosperous Sikhs was fanning the vengeful zeal of mobs. Soon greed was the only motivating factor which upset the carefully balanced equation, leading inadvertently to public exposure and insufferable ridicule for Congress-I Members of Parliament.
Dharam Das Shastri and Jagdish Tytler, both ruling party members harangued the anaesthetised Delhi police, who after days of inactivity arrested several hundred people and recovered loot worth several crores. “They are not criminals’, shrieked Dharam Das Shastri, the then parliamentarian from Karol Bagh, on 5 November, almost physically assaulting the Station House Officer of the local police station, ‘release them’. Jagdish Tytler, MP from Sadar,
barged into the Police Commissioner, Subhash Tandon’s office demanding that his men arrested for looting be freed from police custody. And that too just as Tandon was denying staunchly any political interference in the workings of the police. Ultimately, the police instituted a voluntary disclosure scheme, whereby those possessing loot were asked to return it and go scot free. No questions asked. No action taken.
Both these Congress-I members along with their fellow parliamentarians from Delhi, H K L Bhagat, former Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Bhikhu Ram Jain and Sajjan Kumar, did not deem it fit to even issue statements condemning the rioting till after Indira Gandhi’s cremation. They were all otherwise ‘engaged’. Shortly after returning from the cremation ceremony,
these six politicians issued their routine plea for communal amity. That was all. There was nothing of the shrill and authoritative demands made to the police to release their ‘loyal workers’ who had been apprehended for the ‘harmless’ offence of being in possession of looted property.
H K L Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler, faithful satraps of the Congress-I were retained for the Lok Sabha elections. Dharam Das Shastri and Sajjan Kumar and Bhikhu Ram Jain suffered for their ham-handedness and inefficiency. By axing these three, the Congress-I sought to convince voters that it had purged itself. It
was, none the less, a tacit admission of guilt and involvement in the riots.
Senior police officers also claimed that several Councillors interceded on behalf of violent mobs when a handful tried to stop the arson on 1 November. These officers, also wondered why Kamal Nath, MP, and the Prime Minister’s Doon School mate, was ‘negotiating’ at the Rakabganj Gurdwara where some Sikhs had holed themselves up with a few weapons, preparing to sit out the siege, the same day.
1 November: The forces of destruction are let loose. It is controlled annihilation till the evening, in which all taxi stands and innumerable establishments belonging to Sikhs all over Delhi were first looted and then burnt. The relatively exclusive shopping centres of Connaught Place, South Extension and Karol Bagh, besides affluent colonies in South Delhi, considered immune from the ugliness of mob violence, were not spared. In every case, the marauders came from outside in tempos, armed with inflammables, were pointed in the right direction and let loose. Columns of smoke obscured the Delhi skyline as mobs swaggered round the city ‘avenging’ their dead Prime Minister. A pathetic few who managed to make contact with the police control room, were asked by indifferent voices for their names. If appended with ‘Singh’ the connection was terminated.
All through 1 November, influential Sikhs in Delhi made frantic calls to President Zail Singh and his aides in Rashtrapati Bhavan. Even their clout was insufficient to guarantee succour as many callers had their properties gutted. Obviously the Rashtrapati Bhavan was also not the right place to seek help. The inmates had not been dealt a hand.
The army was officially called out’ in Delhi at 2 O’clock on the afternoon of 1 November. But there was no army in Delhi then. The Internal Security (IS) Brigade meant for such an emergency had shifted to the western sector for surveillance of military exercises. across the border. What little was available had been summoned from nearby cantonments and posted in and around Teen Murti House.
The first lot of soldiers to aid the police, rolled in from Shahjehanpur in Uttar Pradesh, after an overnight drive, sometime in the early hours of 2 November. The army, which, a few months earlier had so effectively sealed off Punjab, was given no specific instructions. They only knew that they had to act under orders of the Delhi Police, itself rudderless and for all practical purposes, leaderless. Army units were told that they would be provided liaison officers on arrival in Delhi, to help in their deployment. No liaison officers were provided. Units had to fend for themselves. With a decade old map of Delhi colonies, particularly of the trans-Jamuna belt, where many roads and colonies were not even marked, for they simply did not exist then, the soldiers were expected not only to police sensitive areas, but also to detect and evacuate refugees.
The paramount hurdle the army faced was a lack of clear-cut instructions and the definition of its jurisdiction. Till such orders, including the authorisation to shoot, were finally received at 3.30 p.m. on 3 November, over 48 hours after they had officially been issued, the army’s hands were tied. It had loose sanction to impose
curfew, but no manpower to do so. Its first two days in Delhi, of the operation codenamed ‘Shanti’, particularly in the trans-Jamuna and West Delhi areas, are something the army would like to forget. Mobs dispersed as stony-faced Majors drove through with their symbolic columns, announcing that curfew was enforced. Once the convoy passed, the mobs reassembled, resuming their looting and killing. These flag marches became meaningful only after armed personnel carriers (APCs) were deployed, showing that the army finally meant business. 3 November onwards, the army opened fire at several places, forcing the restoration of order. But by then the army had been slighted and deliberately made to look like toothless scarecrows in olive green. Four brigades of them.
For the first few days, the ones which really mattered, there was no centralised command. The Commissioner of Police operated from his office at Indraprastha Estate, the Lt-Governor from Raj Niwas in North Delhi and the army from Dhaula Kuan in Southwest Delhi. Distress calls to the army command in the cantonment
area were directed to police control room on the plea that the was authorised to act only on information furnished by the police. The police and the local administration provided little information, misleading the army in many cases.
Even as late as 6 November, the civil authorities were only grudgingly cooperating with the army. The existence of a gurdwara in Durgapuri on Saufoota Road, on the Delhi-UP border, sheltering over 2,000 refugees, had not been revealed to the army. It came as a shock to the commanding officer of the trans-Jamuna area, when I guided him to it. The same night there was another incident, indicating the lack of coordination between the security forces and the
Delhi Police throughout this period.
The army, CRPF (which had at last appeared, its senior officers, boasting to press reporters about their ‘alertness’) and the Delhi Police moved in simultaneously to track down a group of Sikhs who had opened fire indiscriminately in the Paharganj area of Central Delhi. What ensued, was farcical, almost comical had the moment not been so fraught with danger. The entire operation of flushing
out the Sikhs lasted well over 3 hours, but at no stage was it clear who was in command; the army Brigadier, the press hungry CRPF Commandant or the Delhi Police DCP. All were vying for attention and in the process, manoeuvring to get themselves shot in their own crossfire.
The joint report prepared by the People’s Union for Civil liberties and the People’s Union for Democratic Rights succinctly sums up the role of the army, ‘The entire nature of using the army…compels us to suspect whether there was not a deliberate design to keep the army ineffective even after it was called in, and that too following a long interval in which arson, looting and massacre
were allowed to continue, sometimes with the connivance of the local police force’.
Two rumours, one started by the police themselves, fuelled an already volatile situation. One was that Delhi’s water supply had been poisoned by Sikhs in the early hours of 2 November. Police vans toured the city, warning residents against drinking contaminated water. The other rumour was that hundreds of Hindu bodies were being off-loaded at Old Delhi Railway Station from trains steaming in from Punjab. Though both fabrications were denied officially later, damage had been done. The desired effect achieved. The bogey of Independence riots, dormant for 37 years reared itself once again. It readied people to react like killers on the basis State issued ‘truisms’.
THE AFTERMATH
4 November marked the end of normal life for Sikhs. After that, those that were lucky enough, merely managed to survive. Nearly one lakh Sikhs, over three-quarters of them in Delhi alone, had only life left, little else. Traumatised they sought its preservation. Fear no longer had meaning for them. The essence of their existence was in the illusion of the future. They did not know how they would traverse the twilight zone from now to then. The government was unconcerned about how they would.
The State refused to accept the magnitude of the refugee problem. I doubt if they even visualised its colossal proportion. Maybe they did not want to. For the first three days, refugees were catered to primarily by voluntary agencies, mainly the Nagrik Ekta Manch, gurdwaras and fraternal Hindus. To say that the refugees were in camps, during these days is a misnomer. ‘Camps’ suggests
organised effort. There was little of it. They stayed in gurdwaras, police stations and school buildings. A few of these were declared refugee centres by the government later. The others were ignored. The people in them simply did not exist for the authorities.
By 5 November that army had become indispensable. Evacuation of marooned Sikhs from both East and West Delhi fell to their lot. Though hampered by a shortage of vehicles, they harnessed all transport available in these areas to ferry stranded Sikhs to camps. It was still not enough. Refugees, with nothing except the tatters on their backs, continued to pour in, stretching physical barriers to their utmost limits. Assuring safety to these refugees was also the responsibility of the army. The wheel had turned full circle. The same army, hated by Sikhs after Operation Bluestar, was welcomed by them with open arms. Arms stretching out for support.
The sheer weight of numbers in the 18 refugee camps in the city intensified their problems beyond the capabilities of a moribund administration.
The three basic requirements at the camps – food, clothing and medicines – were slow to pour in. Food came from voluntary agencies and a handful of individuals, while a guilt-ridden city emptied out old wardrobes to salve their smug consciences, Teams of young interns from the AIIMS, St Stephen’s Hospital and Mother Teresa’s workers, were the first to provide medical aid. For the first
two days, till 5 November, after Delhi was relatively quiet and some
semblance of order finally enforced by the army, the administration made no move, either to open relief camps, or work towards solving this gargantuan human problem.
The government was busy playing its favourite game of purging administrative heads, replacing them with ostensibly more efficient ones, besides appointing a host of additional hands to ‘coordinate’ various agencies deputed to deal with the situation.
MMK Wali, replaced Gavai and a team of senior bureaucrats were deputed to ‘deal’ with the refugee problem.
Meanwhile, the Nagrik Ekta Manch, a voluntary body primarily of youngsters, conducted and controlled the entire relief work. Founded purely by accident when a group of academicians, students, lawyers and service people, got together at the height of the riots, organising peace marches in various parts of the city, the Manch evolved into a private relief agency, eventually becoming indispensable. With a volunteer force of around 500, the Manch did commendable work, drawing up lists of missing persons, trying to organise compensation and running relief camps that a cussed and callous administration refused to accept or acknowledge existence of. The Manch also moved the Delhi High Court against forceable closure of relief camps by the Delhi administration, and manage to get a stay against governmental coercion of refugees.
The Gandhi Model School, the largest camp in Delhi, was paradigmatic of refugees and their problems involved. Bursting to contain a constant inflow of Sikhs there were around 18,000 at one point the camp for days faced inhuman conditions and the threat of an epidemic breaking out. The injured lay in the open without aid, while thousands were hungry, with all having to defecate and urinate in the very places they slept.
Hundreds of families had been separated, not knowing whether the missing members were dead or simply in hiding. This is an issue which is very alive even today but unfortunately upstaged by time and the impending elections and forgotten. Kewal Singh carried out of Trilokpuri on 2 November, half-dead, after having been stabbed repeatedly in the stomach and ostensibly taken to the hospital by the police, has simply disappeared. There is no record of either his being admitted in any of the city’s hospitals or his demise. Till mid-December the Nagrik Ekta Manch had detailed lists of 1,500 Sikhs, women and children included, still missing. Believed dead.
Initially the atmosphere in the camps was one of despair. Each individual’s tragic plight magnified manifold at the sight of other victims similarly affected. Women and children sought solace in collective misery; chance reunions of sundered families only heightened the woe of those cleaved apart. But within days, the inherent resilience of the Sikhs began to reassert itself. The stronger willed firmly nursed the shell-shocked out of their half-dead state.
In the midst of misery, the entrepreneurship of the Sikhs resulted in langar fires, stoked by the very wood which had once been part of their homes and establishments. No rations or fuel were forthcoming from the State. By the time State succour began trickling in, the refugees were told to prepare to evacuate.
This was the final blow to a shattered people, petrified of returning to homes that were now were nightmares. For many who returned, their homecoming was a flashback to early November. The killers of their families were out on bail after being temporarily behind bars. Public opinion had moved the authorities to take symbolic action. After all, the foreign press was watching.
Even as Sikhs were migrating to camps, many colonies were hit by rumours that Sikhs from Punjab were on the march, seeking blood for blood. Vigilante patrols were raised in numerous colonies by ‘brave’ residents seeking to protect their roosts and brood from the wrath of ‘vengeful’ Sikhs. But in actual fact, this ‘army’ of Sikhs was merely groups of frightened refugees, survivors of the November massacre, bunching together for safety in gurdwaras trying to prevent a repetition of the past few days. In order to counter this fear pre-recorded tapes were constantly played in numerous colonies, warning Hindus to remain awake and guard against a possible attack by Sikhs. Even the police from some trans-Jamuna police stations were responsible for fanning this phobia by touring their
areas and asking people to remain ‘hoshiar’ (vigilant). Advice which the residents followed by venting wrath on any Sikh who happened by.
The thought of returning to Punjab, with which few Sikha had links, having settled in Delhi since partition or even before, was paramount in refugee minds. Please ensure my passage to Punjab’, begged Nanki of Trilokpuri. It was not a solitary cry. The plea was echoed wherever camps were set up in the country. And over the last few weeks in December, desperation has been turned into action. Over 50,000 Sikhs according to various voluntary organisations, fearful of the resurgence of yet another holocaust before voting began on 24 December, migrated to Punjab and parts of Rajasthan. Neither the government nor the ruling party attempted to stem this outflow.
After 5 November, the authorities moved in, granting recognition to 10 camps, but stolidly refusing to accept at least 20 others in various gurdwaras. The pattern was repeated in other parts of the country. In Kanpur, where over 20,000 refugees flocked to police stations and gurdwaras, the government within days disbanded the official camps in an effort to force ‘normalcy’. They refused
to accept the existence of the ones that remained. Though the numbers involved in other cities were less, compared to Delhi’s, the general lack of amenities and total lack of publicity about their plight, only magnified their misery.
On 6 November, the Delhi administration announced a scheme for rehabilitation and appointed Joint Secretaries drawn from various ministries to ‘oversee’ relief operations in camps. Compensation of Rs. 10,000 was to be given to the next of kin of those dead and the same amount to those whose houses had been totally destroyed; Rs. 5,000 for the seriously injured and for substantially damaged houses and Rs. 2,000 to the injured and owners of partially damaged houses respectively.
Factories and business establishments were not covered by this ‘ambitious’ relief programme. They were left to hope that they had by chance, insured themselves against ‘riot’ and ‘burnt down due to proximity’ clauses. Banks and financial institutions were issued the usual symbolic instructions of granting loans on ‘easy’ terms. On 7 November, the Prime Minister announced the release of Rs
40 lakh for relief from the Prime Minister’s relief fund. The government of India had washed its hands off the Sikh riot victims. From now onwards they were on their own.
The arbitrary compensation was just a face-saving gesture, considering the devastation unleashed on the Sikhs. Even the Uttar Pradesh government announced Rs 20,000 compensation for each person killed, and Rs 15,000 for totally destroyed houses. And the manner in which the entire compensation issue was handled reeks of deliberate recalcitrance on the part of Delhi’s officialdom to make financial reparations even. And the amounts stipulated were not paid in full. Most refugees, injured in the riots were handed cheques for Rs 1,000 and informed that their claims had been settled. No arguments, please.
Compensation forms, too, were not available in sufficient numbers. After struggling to get hands on one, claimants had to tackle the labyrinth of certificates, verifications and affidavits to be appended to authenticate claims. Most of the time, these were simply not issued by the police or local administrations. No reasons were given. Being Sikh was reason enough. Illiterate widows, the bulk of compensation seekers, now had to add frustration and penury to their other woes.
WHY?
Why did the killings take place? Why the apathetic aftermath? Is it because state engineered violence is the only way to ensure peace democratically? It is, if the reaction of many educated and ‘enlightened’ people is any indication. The Sikhs should have been taught this lesson months ago’, is their instinctive outburst at any attempt at analysing the November massacre. The involvement of the state is absolved and considered justified. If, only, because the Sikhs have been put in their rightful place.
Can the country survive thus?
If this can happen to Sikhs today, can it not happen to others
tomorrow?
If this can happen in Delhi today, can it not happen in your own
area tomorrow?
Are the Sikhs really to blame? The Sikh problem is a state creation. Narrow, selfish political motives to counter the Akali’s, led Indira Gandhi to nurturing through her son, Sanjay, and the then Punjab Chief Minister, Zail Singh, the seedling, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. The seedling matured into a Machiavellian being that needed Operation Bluestar to eliminate. This State-created monster was dead, but it had left behind a horde of little monsters. Each one of these had to be wiped out. Post Bluestar mopping-up operations further alienated a community tired of State manipulation and accused of separatist motives. There is no validity, however much attempted justification in electioneering advertisements, in humbling an entire community. There was little concern for India’s unity or much touted secularism in Rajiv Gandhi’s statements and vote-gathering speeches. The focus has now shifted from the ruling party trying to retain control of a state to nation trying to hold itself together.
Violence has brought no relief to the State. The November killings were merely a crude attempt to lance itself of the very sores it had irritated and allowed willingly to pustulate. The ramifications are no longer political. Foreign hands are waiting to step in. If they have not already. With the State being portrayed as THE enemy, Indira Gandhi’s much feared foreign hand may already have crept in.
Consider another vital issue: how long can the State use the army for its political ends. And how long will the army respond as puppets? With 9 per cent of the Indian army being Sikhs, will the army itself remain a cohesive unit? It did not take long for lawmen like Satwant Singh and Beant Singh to betray their uniform. The army’s regimentation is rigid. Will time and political circumstance
wear it down?
Peace and fellow feeling have been the bedrock of Indian democracy, fostered by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru during the freedom struggle. The new generation of Nehru’s and Gandhi’s hold no legacy of those times or of those statesmen. A generation of Sikhs orphaned by their State is growing up. Peace, and not violence, should be waiting at their crossroads.