New Delhi was undoubtedly the epicentre of the quake that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. But the tremors in the states surrounding Delhi were of a matching magnitude, if not more. Though the Nanavati Report speaks of the big sharks, the minnows who executed the bloodbath in towns and cities of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are still out of the net. In October 1984, we were living in the small district of Sagar in Madhya Pradesh. I was in class II. A call at 1 am on November 1 sent my family into a frenzy. All our business establishments had been consigned to flames. Friends of my father in the police and the administration expressed helplessness, “Political bosses ka order hai.” By morning, a prosperous Sikh colony in the city was reduced to ashes. Since we were living in the cantonment area, the surging mob took time to reach there. Sobbing, my sisters and I sat huddled in a corner of a room. My parents decided to sent us to the nuns of the convent school I was studying in. We could see the raging flames of the torches the mobs were carrying as they drew near amid slogans of “Indira Gandhi amar rahe”. Our neighbour, a senior police official, asked us to rush to his house. My parents gathered some valuables and moved to a neighbour’s house. I kept crying. My school bag was left behind. Fortunately, the army reached before the mob. The three Sikh houses in our lane got protection. When people living in gurdwaras and camps came to know, they left their daughters with us. Our house looked like a relief camp. In neighbouring UP, people were taken out of trains and massacred. My Kanpur-based bua and her family of five had to spend 38 hours in the toilet of an office, where they took refuge from the mobs. When my father’s cousin — travelling in a nondescript town of MP, Morena — did not return home for about 10 days, the wailing family held his bhog ceremony. After a week, he returned. He said he jumped off the train and lived in the jungles for days. After the riots were over, it was difficult to resume normal life. My parents told me not to talk about “it” at school. I had to even part with my surname, Bindra, as it sounded like “Bhindra” and some of my classmates had started teasing me as the “niece of Bhindranwale”. After a few years, when the memories of Bhindranwale started fading, I quietly retrieved my surname. Jagdish Tytler has just stepped down as minister. But who will bring to book MLAs, Congress councilors, district and block party members, who were the torchbearers of carnage? And the government ration licencees who supplied copious kerosene to set afire Sikh houses? When a report focusing on riots in the Capital had to cross so many hurdles to reach a shaky table, fixing responsibility for the ethnic cleansing in small towns and districts is a far-fetched dream.
