‘Documenting a Pogrom’ by Manjeet H Singh: 1984, the darkest chapter

Two generations have reached adulthood since the anti-Sikh pogrom, executed largely by loyalists of the then ruling Congress, following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984.

In the intervening 40 years, innumerable books, documentaries and other writings have detailed this massacre, which persisted unchecked for 72 hours till Gandhi’s cremation three days later on November 3. However, the gore of the carnage — in which some 3,350 Sikhs were killed, according to official estimates, 2,733 in New Delhi alone — still endures. Human rights organisations and independent observers put the death toll countrywide at over 5,000, in what undeniably remains Independent India’s worst such butchery.

In ‘Documenting a Pogrom’, social activist Manjeet Hardev Singh diligently details the systematic killings by mobs directed by Congress supporters and abetted by conniving, and at times participatory, Delhi Police personnel.

Citing eyewitness accounts, court documents and affidavits by the massacre survivors to a smattering of some 15 inquiry commissions, committees and special investigation teams over 16 years alongside other credible sources, she chillingly, but somewhat densely, records the festering politics leading to Gandhi’s killing, and the minutiae of the pogrom.

Other than enumerating the Delhi killings, which most chroniclers have tended to concentrate upon, Singh particularises Sikh slayings in other parts of India which, over the years, have not received adequate attention. Also under Congress patronage, these took place in cities and towns in Bihar, UP, Haryana, MP, HP and even J&K, where 17 Sikh workers at the Salal Dam project in Udhampur were shot dead and burnt alive.

The myriad mobs’ brutality pan-India, writes Singh, was unbelievable, especially in Delhi’s poorer areas, where it was so gruesome and bestial that it seemed to be the work of “maniacal professionals or of psychopaths” wielding iron rods, lathis, kerosene oil and acid powder. Through official declarations, she incisively reveals the complicity of several Congress MPs, like the late HKL Bhagat and the recently re-convicted Sajjan Kumar, in these massacres as well as that of the Delhi Police, who guaranteed immunity to the killer mobs.

Subsequent efforts to secure justice too proved futile, says Singh, as the judiciary was “manipulated” to shield those responsible for the state-sponsored pogrom, in what will remain one of the darkest chapters of jurisprudence. The courts, she claims, were used at every stage to deny the demands for an impartial inquiry and later to “throttle investigations” into widespread allegations of police involvement in the pogrom, and thereafter to absolve the guilty.

The media, too, remained largely “strait-jacketed during the violence, secure in the comfort zone of facile reportage”, Singh damningly declares and goes on to extrapolate that the state-backed genocide paved the way for similar massacres of Muslim and Christian minorities in 2002 in BJP-ruled Gujarat and in 2008 in Odisha. Thereafter, the scourge of sectarianism and communalisation “rooted in the frightening collusion of the economic right and religious right” has only worsened, cautions Singh and cynically warns all thinking Indians against this alarming phenomenon.

— The writer is a senior journalist