The Enemy Within

Ivan Fera

First published inThe Illustrated Weekly of India. 23 December 1984.

In Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the prime minister sees an international plot to divide the country. To come about, what such a conspiracy needs is precisely the attitude that made the large-scale massacre of the Sikhs possible. That Mrs Gandhi’s death and her policy towards Punjab had to be avenged in the streets and vindicated in the forthcoming polls, even at the cost of a communal mandate.

The continuation of the official policy towards Punjab will only complete the alienation of the Sikhs as a community, says Ivan Fera, while reporting from Delhi on the events that took place immediately after the assassination.

It was on attempt not merely to “kill an individual, as Rajiv Gandhi sees it, but to divide the nation. A deep-seated international conspiracy may well be at work in the assassination of Mrs Gandhi, but to perceive it is not necessarily to rise above it. What the leaders of the Congress-1 will not admit is that the enemy is within.

The prime minister cannot both see an international conspiracy and justify the continuation of Mrs Gandhi’s policies towards Punjab. In its final denouement — the deepening of the divide between Hindus and Sikhs — what such a wider plot needs to fulfil itself, is precisely, armed repression — the reinforcement of troops in Punjab, the suspension of the political process. Can the Congress government extricate itself from the conspiracy?

A political killing cannot alone suffice. As Rajiv Gandhi himself put it, a nation cannot be destroyed by an assassin’s bullet. For far too many Congressmen, particularly those who have been identified by the Sikh survivors, Mrs Gandhi’s was a death that had to be avenged, not mourned. In a span of just four days, more than 1,500 people were killed in Delhi alone, and almost as many women rendered widows at one stroke, with no one to fall back upon except their daughters.

It was as though the assassination was a defeat; the official policy towards Punjab had to be vindicated in the streets, and now, in the forthcoming polls. The party is borne towards the hustings on the crest of a communal wave. Bhindranwale could have asked for no- thing more.

It is important to look closely at ‘the spontaneous outburst of anger’ as the riots were officially characterised, to see how deep-rooted the conspiracy is.

Over 1,500 people cannot be killed in four days in a single city without the logistics being engineered. A spontaneous outburst would at the most explain Sikhs being killed in the streets, where particularly those men are easily identifiable in public. It is an altogether different exercise to pick out Sikh households from a cluster of anonymous flats or houses in heterogenous residential colonies, which in fact accounted for the majority of the killings. This calls for very precise information, and such attacks on residential colonies were carried out on the basis of lists ration card and voters lists used for the purpose. In other words, the mobs had to be directed, and adequate supplies of kerosene oil. diesel and petrol released to make such large-scale burning of bodies and houses possible.

Equally, certain conditions were necessary before violence of such dimensions— unparalleled in any but the partition riots— was possible. The first of those was the official obstacles, by and large, in the path of the mobs. The paralysis of the civil administration and of the’ police, the long delay in imposing a curfew and calling in troops which arrived only at 2 am on November 2, gave the mobs the run of the streets for three days. The army first opened fire, on the crowds only on the afternoon of November 2.

As a highly placed official in the home ministry pointed out, the coordination of the attacks and the logistics cannot come about on their own, but as with other communal riots, requires an existing organisation, capable of raising crowds and volunteers to direct them, mobilising underworld criminals and effecting fuel supplies, and an agency powerful enough to neutralise the police and ensure immunity from prosecution.

Members of a party in power are best placed to do this, but so can an organisation capable of appealing to the communal sentiments of the constabulary, as was the case with the Shiv Sena during the Bombay riots. In Delhi, in the trans-Jamuna area for instance, where some of the worst massacres occurred, the RSS exercises a dominant influence, but so does the Congress-I, particularly in the resettlement colonies. While some eye’ witness accounts from the riot victims in the camps identify local RSS or BJP workers, the vast majority name Congress-I politicians, including a few MPs. It was no different in relief camps located throughout the city. The majority of the politicians whose involvement was alleged, belonged to the Congress-I.

Ajit Singh, a former block president of the party and a founder of the Congress committee in Uttamuagar, himself a riot victim in the Janakpuri relief camp, mentions the involvement of H.K.L. Bhagat, the MP Sajjan Kumar, the local block president of the party Chaudhury Saheb Singh, the general secretary of the district Youth Congress committee Rajinder Sharma, and Hanuman Prasad Sharma, the general secretary of the Madipur block committee of the Congress-I.

At Uttamnagar, the crowds were directed by local Congress-I workers in a jeep. Local Congress-I leaders were also identified by the Sikh survivors from Trilokpuri and Kalyanpuri who saw them pointing out the target households. At Trilokpuri. the name most commonly mentioned was that of Rampal Saroj, and at Kalyanpuri, a Dr Ashok, both party functionaries.

The composition of the mobs can now be ascertained from the areas from which most of the loot has since been recovered by the police. These are largely the villages on the outskirts of the city like Mandoli, Chilla. and those around Loni, as well as the resettlement colonies in the trans-Jamuna area, as well as colonies of shim dwellers and of sweepers. In terms of communities, the mobs largely comprised Haryanvi Jats. Gujjars (milk vendors) scheduled castes and some Muslims.

The resettlement colonies in the trans-Jamuna area, where entire Sikh colonies were almost completely wiped out, are virtually a creation of the Congress-I, a consequence of Sanjay Gandhi’s slum clearance drive during the Emergency. Most of the slum-dwellers evicted from New Delhi, were settled in these colonies, which have been nurtured as Congress-1 strongholds, a base from which crowds for public meetings and other political events are regularly raised.

The partisan attitude of the police in most parts of the country is now almost a common feature of communal riots, but where these are characterised by the indifference of the forces responsible for law and order, Delhi is singular with instances of the police actually egging on the mobs, and in some cases, even participating in the looting. Near the Kingsway police line for instance, constables had the time to pick and choose, and were seen trying to match cuts of cloth against their shirt cuffs before hauling them over their camp walls.

In several parts of the city, the police were nowhere to be seen; where they were, they stood by as passive spectators, or deliberately spurred the mobs on. L.K.Advani, general secretary of the BJP, recalls a senior member of the party, M.L. Khurana, rushing up to an addition- al commissioner of police HC Jatav, who stood calmly watching the mobs on the rampage. At Khurana’s protests, Jatav said “What’s the problem? Let it go on for a while’, (“toda hone do; aisi kya baat hai?”).

Phone calls and even visits to the police stations, got people nowhere: the police flatly turned down appeals for help and refused to register any complaints. Several survivors in the relief camps tell of how they were virtually driven out of the police stations — “Get out before they attack us as well.”

At the control room in Shakkarpur, the major in command complained bitterly of the fact that the local DCP, Seva Dass, was absent throughout for three days from the station. “I saw him once or twice very briefly, and told him he was needed here, but he was nowhere to be seen ” The extent of the violence around Shakharpur in east Delhi, the major said, could largely be accounted for by the fact that there were virtually no policemen available to maintain law and order. Most of them were posted at Teen Murti and in the New Delhi security districts, to protect the dignitaries from abroad who had come to attend the cremation. Other reinforcements brought in, like contingents of the SRP from Magpur, were not used to control the riots, but were likewise. posted at Teen Murti.

Ram Jethmalani recalls that at their first meeting with the newly elected prime minister, the Opposition leaders minced no words in protesting against the total failure of the police to intervene in the situation. Rajiv Gandhi, Jethmalani says, wrote off the police entirely and said they were only waiting for the army to arrive. The police he felt were incapable of controlling the situation.

One explanation that has been repeatedly advanced in the capital to explain the indifference and the complicity of the police is that a large part of the constabulary is comprised of Jats from Haryana, whose traditional dislike of Sikhs was in this situation, indulged in with a vengeance.

While the attitude of the police was one of the basic conditions that made the carnage possible, it does not by itself explain either of Us extent or its nature. There is evidence in fact, of a high degree of coordination and technique. A senior official of the Homo ministry, who had studied several communal riots, at close quarters, more recently, Bhiwandi and Hyderabad, is convinced that what converted Delhi was no ordinary riot. “The patterns,” he says “are too obvious to ignore. How does one. account for the fact that at about 5 pm on the evening of the 31st, when Mrs Gandhi’s body was brought out of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, riots broke out simultaneously not only in Delhi, but in other parts of the country as well?”

What is striking he observes, was that the pattern of arson and killing was identical, particularly throughout New Delhi. This is where the nature of violence in the differs fundamentally from communal riots elsewhere in the recent past seen in its totality, the patterns of violence are always localised in any communal riot, and there are significant local variations; the modes of attack differ from place to place, depending on local conditions. At Bhiwandi for instance, although there was large-scale killing and arson, the Muslims were not everywhere burnt to death as they were at Ansari BaglL In other places, slum huts arid power looms were set on fire, but no bodies were burnt. When the riots spread to Bombay, the patterns were once again, chequered — arson was only confined to certain areas; in others knives and small bombs were variously used.

Delhi was different: This Home ministry official points out that the techniques used almost everywhere were the same. In the north of the worst and south-west, the bodies were burnt everywhere. In most cases, the victims were first assaulted with iron rods, then doused with kerosene and set alight. It was only in some of the more affluent residential areas like Vasant Vihar and South Extension, that there was more looting and arson but no killing.

Apart from kerosene, the bodies were burnt with petrol as also with diesel oil. Tyres, filled with diesel or petrol, were also used for the same purpose— to burn the bodies.

There was equally a method in the manner in which trucks were attacked. The driver was first pulled out and killed. Once the tyres were set alight, the fuel tank was punctured, That did the job— it ensured that the truck would burn completely. The driver’s body was then thrown in between the wheels. The heat was so intense that the road under the vehicle was turned into a puddle of boiling tar.

In sharp contrast, the shops do not appear to have been burnt with either petrol or diesel or kerosene, and the arson in this case equally reveals technique. A rough and ready test was to sniff the charred rags inside the shop, which however, did not give off an odour of any of these fuels. This fact, the official argues, points to the use of some combustible chemical, rather than kerosene or petrol — a hypothesis that seems to be confirmed by several eyewitness accounts, of ‘a black powder being thrown’, instantly set alight by a match.

This intelligence official however argues that a very large-scale coordination was essential to ensure adequate releases of various fuels all over the city, and particularly, of special combustible chemicals. In other words, both the nature and the extent of the violence points to the fact that the riots were planned. If it is true that the patterns were identical, and simultaneous on such a scale, it is difficult to explain the riots as a result of chance rather than of design.

The use of electoral rolls is particularly evident from the few instances of mistaken attacks on Hindu tenants, who had since the last polls moved into a house previously occupied by a Sikh family— whose names however still appeared against that address on the electoral rolls. To combat the use of these lists, the residents. of one colony in the city voluntarily obliterated the house numbers from their walls.

There were eyewitness accounts from all parts of the city, of men on scooters who in each colony located the Sikh households for the mobs following close on their heels — a feature confirmed by intelligence officials as well. One of the tallest buildings in Saket was so placed that the residents on its upper floors could see two localities on either side coming under attack at once from mobs which surged from two different directions. Curiously enough, the attacks in two separate localities were being coordinated by men in a green Ambassador which moved continuously from one area to the other.

Intelligence officials uncovered the use of even more refined techniques. At precisely 9 pm each night, in different parts of the city, an alert was raised: There were cries of “jagte raho; hamla annewala hai” (keep alert; there’s an attack coming.) For the next 10 to 15 minutes, the alert was sounded in other localities far removed from each other, in all directions. Dead quiet, broken suddenly by the roar of a mob; silence and then, screams.’

Those signals of impending attacks were immediately relayed to control rooms and command headquarters by army columns stationed in various parts of the city, and orders immediately issued for troops to move in the direction of attack, but no mobs were to be found. Intelligence sleuths who investigated this phenomenon, discovered loudspeakers strategically placed, relaying taped messages. Two men were arrested manning these P A systems, a Muslim and a Jain, but the tapes could not be recovered from them.

The most heinous aspect of the violence was that II was directed at the girls and the women who were spared. Certain images had to be burned into the psyche. How else to explain the fact that the men were not merely killed but tortured to death— limb severed from limb, eyes gouged out, burnt while they were still alive — in instance after instance, all over the city, in the very presence of their children and their wives? The killings were ritualistic. In several cases, the hair of the victims was shorn off, and then beards set on fire before they were killed. As a senior Sikh bureaucrat in the Union ministry sees it, ‘it seemed to have been a deliberate attempt to humiliate, to subjugate, to rule out any future possibility of retaliation.”

What baffles senior bureaucrats in the home ministry and intelligence officials, is the ritualistic savagery that characterised the killings. Nothing explains this aspect, which sets this riot apart from any other since partition. Not envy, nor even inter-communal hatred. The villagers on the outskirts of the city, Haryanvi Jats and Gujjars, robbed of their lands for a pittance, naturally resent the modern residential complexes that have replaced their fields and reduced them to a marginalised; insecure livelihood. Another argument reduced to explain the savagery is that the poorest of the poor have been dehumanised by their struggle for survival. But slum dwellers and villagers as destitute have been known to participate in other communal riots, most recently in Bhiwandi, but none of these were marked by such widespread barbarism.

Undoubtedly, the savagery points to how deeply the Sikhs as a community are hated— perhaps because, like the Muslims during the partition riots, they are now perceived virtually as national enemies.

In the last analysis, the total paralysis of the police and the civil administration that made violence on such a scale possible, cannot be affected only by the logistics of a cold-blooded coordination but requires a charged climate, particularly to inspire such savagery. Such a climate cannot come into being at short notice. Certain myths and caricatures, figures of evil, have to take root in the popular psyche, before mobs with a single purpose can be born. In short, the gradual targeting of the Sikhs as a community — not only in Punjab, but all over the country — the process by which Bhindranwale was made to represent the Sikhs as a whole.

It began with the disastrous strategy of building up Bhindranwale as a foil to the Akalis, which led to the gradual destruction of the only moderate political platform in the agitation and strengthened the extremists to the point where national public opinion laced by the killing of Hindus, prepared the ground for armed intervention. The Sikh majority, totally opposed to Bhindranwale, was rendered voiceless. This process went a step further with the White Paper that followed Operation Bluestar.

A week before the army action, the Akalis were still officially perceived as a moderate political party with whom it was perfectly justifiable to negotiate a settlement. In the light of the White Paper, however, which emphasised an imperialist plot and the large-scale acquisition of arms and made no distinction between the moderates and the extremists, the Akalis’ very ambivalence was suspect; in short they were anti-nationals, with whom a negotiated settlement was impossible.

Perhaps what was most damaging was the official response to the deep anguish of the Sikhs as a community to the destruction of the Akal Takht. “Why did you not raise your voice when the Golden Temple was being turned into an arsenal?” is the question commonly posed to Sikhs. This overlooked the fact that the government was fully aware of the infiltration of arms into the shrine, which in fact was carried out under the very noses of the CRPF and the BSF. The effect of such a response however was to officially identify the Sikhs as a whole with the demand for Khalistan.

The atmosphere was now ripe for a pogrom against the Sikhs. Operation Bluestar, delayed to the point of desperation, officially removed the deep-seated blocks in the Indian psyche’ against assaulting a religious shrine. Such assaults in the wake of an official precedent, were now legitimised, and in New Delhi, the riots in every locality began with an attack on the gurdwaras. It was the first instance in history since the Moghuls. Since Shah Abdali, that the Sikh shrines were invaded.

What made such violation possible was equally the fact that in Punjab, for the first time, the government attempted to radically restructure the church of a particular community — the disastrous attempt to foist a Nihang leader upon the Sikhs as a high priest, to create a new religious sect through the Sarbat Khalsa. Nothing was sacred anymore, everything was permitted. It was the first time that such invasions into the psyche of a particular community were carried out for purely political ends. Officially violated to this extent, the Sikhs were now common fodder for everyone. Identified as a whole with Bhindranwale, it was only natural now for the Sikhs to be identified with the assassination of Mrs Gandhi. All that was needed to do the trick was a few rumours about Sikhs distributing sweets There were no scruples left – either religious or legal. Any tiling could be done to them now, and it would be totally justified. The Sikhs were completely vulnerable.

In such a climate, with the Sikhs having been targeted as a community, it is not difficult to understand the government’s initial inaction in restoring law and order and providing relief. No instructions from the top to this effect were even necessary, once the logistics were organised—fuel, mobs, voting lists. The climate would suffice to take care of that It is hardly surprising therefore that even bureaucrats of the level of secretaries in the Union government should not have been greatly disturbed by the massacres. The common reaction was: “They deserved it. They had gone a bit too far. They were tolerated for too long. They needed to be taught a lesson.” 

The alienation of the Sikhs as a community was now officially and socially complete. This was forcefully brought home to them by the fact that even four days later, there was no relief forthcoming from the government. The survivors were evacuated from their residential colonies by the army and taken as a rule, to the police stations, which were soon bursting at the seams, the toilets running like open sewers. That was all in the way of relief. There was no food, much loss clothing or medicine.

The Sikhs had largely to fall back on their own resources, and in several cases, they opened community schools and turned them into relief camps, and set up langars, (community kitchens) to feed the survivors. Particularly in the west of Delhi, where a number of relief camps were set up in gurdwaras, even the first batches of clothes and medicine for the victims were raised from within the community. This was equally the case in one of the largest camps in the east, at Gandhinagar.

ft was hardly surprising that particularly in west Delhi, in several relief camps, in Sadar Bazar, Janakpuri, the victims on principle re-fused to accept any government aid, and would take relief only from voluntary agencies. At Janakpuri, two signboards were erected at each gate at either end of the camp that said: ‘Sorry. No Congress-I politicians allowed. The other read: ‘No stray dogs allowed. Both were removed by the police.

These were the first signs of a new Sikh militancy most sharply evident in several of the relief camps in the west of the city, many of which were situated in gurdwaras. Though deep resentment against the police and the administration was common to relief camps in the city, in the west, it seemed to have crystallised with a sharp focus on the Congress-I. Unlike the camps in the east, most -of the riot victims in the west came from the middle class. As one of the survivors here put it: “Now it seems, in retrospect, that what our leaders in Punjab were telling us about the Congress-I is true. They are totally against the Sikhs.”

In these camps are a few army officers, subedar majors and junior commissioned officers (JCOs) who several days after the riots had not reported back on duty. South-west Delhi is dominated by an army cantonment, and a large population of defence personnel. One of the camps off Palam Road is in fact almost entirely filled with riot victims from defence services, and there is a sprinkling of them in other camps as well.

The attacks on defence personnel reportedly on both officers and men in uniform show how far the Sikhs as a community have been targeted and isolated. In some of these camps, the first signs of unrest in the defence services was already evident A JCO in one of these camps, who was sought to be prevented from talking to this correspondent by his sister, and a colleague, a subedar major, burst out: “So what if I tell him everything? I’m prepared to walk out of the army!’

In an application addressed to his camp commandant, the JCO said “I am afraid to join my duty and the Army HQ Camp. If I am required in the office, a transport may kindly be detailed for my travel from my quarter to my duty station, and back. As I have seen Sikh soldiers being killed. I am afraid to join my office and the army HQ Camp.”

The letter is obviously a clear reflection of the JCO’s highly ex-cited and confused state of mind, torn between his loyalties to his religion and to the army, a trauma that several Sikhs in the army would be going through, To this must be added the figure of 3,000 deserters in the wake of Operation Bluestar, under the care of a brigadier, who accordingly to Home ministry sources, does not know what to do with them.

Not surprisingly, one of the camps in which defence personnel were largely quartered, was placed under the control of the army, and the press totally barred access to its inmates.

Particularly in camps in the west of Delhi, the feeling of alienation has crystallised into a general demand for ghettos— for residential colonies comprised exclusively of Sikhs. As the survivors pointed out, Sikhs were safe only where they lived together in colonies too large to attack, and could organise their own defence. It was in the heterogenous colonies that they were targets. In a few cases, the response of the victims was even more extreme: “Why don’t the authorities discharge us and send us back to Punjab?” a defence employee asked. “We don’t feel safe here anymore.”

It was perhaps to counter the growing militancy and the politicisation of the refugees particularly in the west of Delhi, that the relief camps began to be broken up less, than a week after the riots and the victims sent back to their homes. Their reluctance to return, however, was not characteristic of their militancy. All too often, they could identify their assailants or those who aided the mobs with supplies of fuel and addresses in their own neighbourhoods.

In some of the worst-hit localities like Trilokpuri and Kalyanpuri in east Delhi, where entire communities had been wiped out almost to a man, the refugees sent from camps to their homes, came trickling back. They were from the Resettlement Colonies — rows of one room tenements, clenched like teeth, in blocks each about a 100 yards in length. It was unthinkable that the survivors could be expected to go back and take up their lives again in the midst of their very assailants.

The trickle back to the relief camps was the first indication that a large number of the survivors had been permanently uprooted from their neighbourhoods, from the larger community. Their rehabilitation cannot be a simple matter of immediate relief in terms of food, medicine and clothing supplied to the relief camps in the first few days but is a question of their integration back into the national mainstream. The Sikhs as a community and as individuals are now trapped within themselves. Painted birds— targets for the rest of the flock.

Apart from the return flow of refugees from the worst hit localities back to the camps, the others were only persuaded to go back with difficulty, on the basis of personal assurances from the army commanders, who vouched for their safety. Doubtless, it was for this reason that the government was forced to announce that the army would remain in the capital as long as was necessary. How long, according to one of the senior area commanders, was anybody’s guess.

The alienation of the Sikhs is of course, not confined to their residential neighbourhoods alone, but at once embraces the entirety of their lives in society, above all, their work situations. Senior Sikh bureaucrats, in the Union ministry already perceive the first signals of files and decisions being discreetly routed past them and wonder how long this distrust will last.

A clear instance of this, according to non-Sikh intelligence officials, is that one reason the interrogation of Satwant Singh was not handed over to the CBI in Delhi, was that it was headed by a Sikh. Since he could not be bypassed, officials under him could only be used for the investigation by constituting a special team headed by Anand Ram. It is a distrust that is bound to cut both ways. As one Sikh bureaucrat pointed out, Sikh civil servant will now be inclined to attribute any slight or injustice done to him to his being a member of a specific community.

A large-scale screening of Sikhs on principle in all government bodies and particularly, in sensitive departments like security agencies, seems underway. The question is whether such scrutiny can serve any point at all, particularly if it is carried out on the basis that a man is suspect by virtue of being a Sikh. As one Sikh bureaucrat put if, a consequence that is bound to follow is that the community will now demand as proof of secularism and fair play, that government jobs be reserved for them on par with the quotas they earlier enjoyed— which were much larger than their population’ would proportionally warrant.

What the massacre in Delhi and elsewhere in the country has achieved is to have exported the Punjab question beyond the borders of the state on to Sikhs residing everywhere in India. Most of these families, who have for generations lived outside Punjab, are for all purposes emotionally, politically and economically committed to the states in which they live.

The tragic irony of the pogroms against the Sikhs is that they have almost achieved what Bhindranwale had set out to do. In the last phase of his agitation, a few months before the army action, he had ordered a large-scale massacre of the Hindus. His ultimate aim was to provoke a massive Hindu backlash, and thus effect the total alienation of. his community. That he failed to set off communal riots particularly in Punjab, testifies to the fact that the secular majority in that state was not with him.

The Hindu backlash has now occurred, as a consequence of the Congress-I’s disastrous strategy of attempting to fight communalism with communalism— a situation that can only lead towards the gradual institution of military rule.

When the riots broke out in Delhi, troops were airlifted from the south to Chandigarh, to hold the sensitive border state down. With the suspension of elections in Punjab, and the reinforcement of military rule, the crisis in that state has not only been deepened but exported beyond its borders.

There is hardly any point in talking of investigating an imperialist plot to destabilise the subcontinent. Even if there were one, surely the last step towards an irrevocable situation is to force the government towards a policy of even greater repression in Punjab. To justify such a policy is virtually to be party to the destabilisation of the nation. As one prominent Opposition leader put it, “Let us not forget that even force could not keep Bangladesh with Pakistan.”