Waiting for closure

Set up in 2000, 16 years after the event it was investigating, the Commission’s findings have little relevance for the Sikh on the street. If there’s one common emotion centred around it, it’s this: Let it not stir up trouble. We’ve lived through enough.

The Nightmare
WHEN Indira Gandhi was assassinated at 9.20 am on October 31, 1984, by two of her own bodyguards, Beant and Satwant Singh, no one—let alone the Sikh community—could have had any inkling of the repercussions a single group of people would have to bear.

By 5.30 that same afternoon, tempers had flared among Congress supporters who massed at AIIMS where her body was kept, and where Rajiv Gandhi had arrived after jetting in from West Bengal. In the late afternoon, the cavalcade of then President Giani Zail Singh, on his way from Rashtrapati Bhawan, was stoned. Mobs then fanned out from the hospital and attacked Sikh localities, beginning with the neighbouring constituency of Congress councillor Arjun Das.

Over the next week, mobs systematically targeted Sikhs and killed nearly 3,000 people in Delhi before the situation was brought under control and the survivors rescued. The mobs were allegedly incited and led by Congressmen, an allegation based on the fact that Sikh families were reportedly identified from voters’ lists. Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘‘when a big tree falls, the earth shakes’’ did not help either.

In some of independent India’s most gruesome scenes, Sikh men and youths, even children were beaten, hacked or burnt to death in public. ‘‘We still remember seeing children being thrown into trucks, locked up and then set on fire, even as the children screamed to the mob that they should be spared,’’ recalls Baksheesh Kaur, who lost her husband and son to the mob.

Neither the police nor other organisations were of any help, as survivors recount. ‘‘When we ran from our house, we had one thing only in mind: we must not approach the police. The mob that killed my husband and father-in-law was led by local policemen,’’ remembers Gurbaksh Kaur.

Balwinder Singh, says his mother Sanjeet Kaur, was 10 when he saw his father being hacked to death near the Yamuna bridge near Seelampur. ‘‘He was beaten and bruised on the head and neck too, but he threw sand in the eyes of the attackers and ran,’’ she recalls, the two-decade-old memory of finding him relatively unharmed in West Delhi still bringing tears in her eyes.

Yet others sacrificed their most precious religious belief and cut their hair to blend with the crowd. Panicked citizens who sought safety in gurdwaras found their faith misplaced: several places of worship were desecrated, looted and set on fire by the mobs, according to survivors.

But there were tales of kindness too, of strangers giving lifts to young men on the run, or neighbours sheltering entire families in cramped little rooms for several days together.

Finally, four days after the most horrific carnage, the army entered the streets, complete with armoured vehicles, and quelled the mobs. Stray incidents, however, continued for several more days.

The Shortchanging
OF the Rs 10 lakh promised as compensation for each death in the anti-Sikh riots, some families have seen less than a quarter. Others claim receiving interest-claims on supposedly free compensatory DDA flats. Still others accuse the Congress of harassment because they refused to vote for the party again, while yet others allege police harassment, particularly during the peak periods of Punjab militancy.

The killings, especially since they came without warning, destroyed entire families. Established, prosperous families found themselves on the streets, usually supported by the women or a minor son. Compensation packages included government jobs, but only in Grade IV. Overnight, the social and economic fabric of the community came to be in tatters; fissures sprang up, too, with relatives in Punjab.

In the years after, many families returned to their roots in that state. Some of them never came back. Others did, but only after long gaps, which explains why there were major delays in filing FIRs. Survivors also accuse the police of flatly refusing to cooperate in filing FIRs or taking down eyewitness accounts long after ‘peace’ had returned to the streets of Delhi.

The Judgments
IN a landmark judgment relating to the matter of compensation, the Delhi High Court in May this year directed the government to pay Rs 1.23 lakh as compensation for each person who suffered injuries in the riots. Holding the state responsible for the lives of citizens during mob violence, Justice Gita Mittal passed the order in the case of Manjir Singh, who was badly injured by a mob which killed seven people at Tughlakabad railway station in November 1984.

The judgment, according to those who have followed the riots and their aftermath, will benefit more than 2,800 people who sustained serious injuries at the hands of the mob.

Apart from the court rulings, the riots have been covered by inquiry commissions—nine of them. The first such panel, constituted to study police conduct during the riots, was led by senior police official Ved Marwah.

Justice Ranganath Mishra was appointed head of the next commission in April 1985; its findings, submitted in 1987, have been criticised as biased: On its basis, most prominent Congress leaders were either acquitted or never chargesheeted.

In particular, Mishra categorically said that H K L Bhagat had ‘‘no role’’ in the riots at all. ‘‘Shocking,’’ is how advocate Harvinder Singh Phoolka, who represented victims at the Mishra inquiry proceedings, describes the role of the judiciary so far.

In February 1987, the Jain-Banerjee panel was appointed to recommend registration of cases, while the Kapoor-Mittal Committee looked into the role of the police, and the Ahuja Committee looked into the number of people killed.

In 1990 came the Potti-Rosha Committee, while the Jain-Aggarwal commission was set up by the Delhi government. Thereafter the Narula advisory committee was formed. Three ‘fast-track’ courts were set up during V P Singh’s tenure as prime minister, but hundreds of cases reportedly ended up being dismissed summarily.

The New Commission
THE Justice G T Nanavati Commission was appointed to inquire afresh into the riots on May 10, 2000. It finally submitted its 185-page report to Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil on February 9 this year; the six-month deadline for its publication expires tomorrow.

The victims were represented by the 1985 Carnage Justice Committee formed by eminent citizens. Some of the submissions made to the Commission say that the Congress government at the Centre deliberately delayed sending in the army. Writer Patwant Singh deposed before the Commission that when he personally asked the President to go on air in November and urge calm, the President said he had no powers to intervene.

Then Home Minister P V Narasimha Rao too reportedly told Patwant Singh that the army would be brought in only on the evening of November 3; thus ‘‘the murderous mobs were given a free hand for three days,’’ Singh said in his affidavit.

The Tomorrow
MOST survivors, however, care little whether the commission has levelled any fresh charges or even indicted prominent Congress leaders such as Jagdish Tytler, Bhagat or Sajjan Kumar.

‘‘These names mean little to us. We never saw them, instead we saw our neighbours or friends in the mob, people we thought we knew well. We might identify some of them now, but it has been too long. We must look for better things,’’ says Kuldeep Singh, who was 15 when he lost his father and grandfather to rampaging mobs.

At the same time, certain community groups have long emphasised the need for speedier processes. On November 1 last year, the twentieth anniversary of the riots, activists and survivors marched to demand swifter justice.

Sikh militancy was born in the flames of the Delhi riots, and fed on the sense of insecurity Sikh youngsters began to acquire after the horror of the first week of November 1984. Even now, mention of the riots touches a raw nerve in Punjab, and Sikh terrorist groups and Khalistan proponents use it as a handle to recruit cadres. It remains to be seen whether the Nanavati Commission report can make a difference.

Starting From Scratch

HER nine-year-old granddaughter Kuljeet Kaur’s poem shares wallspace with images of the Gurus in Baksheesh Kaur’s two-room apartment, twin reminders of the faith and optimism that saw her family through its darkest hours. Dressed in white, stark in the dingy surroundings, she listens silently as her son Harpal recounts the night of October 31, 1984.

‘‘They dragged out my father—he had retired by then from the army as havildar-major—and killed him. My 21-year-old brother Harkirat was up on the terrace, he saw the murder and cried out. So they went up and killed him too,’’ remembers Harpal, 35. His mother, with the curious resignation of the very old or the very helpless, adds in a whisper, ‘‘Teen tukde kar diye.’’

The other family members fled in time to escape the carnage, but were refused shelter by almost every neighbour in their Laxminagar locality. Finally, 50 of them found refuge with a washerman in an adjoining street. ‘‘For three days, we huddled together in one room, till we were rescued by the army,’’ remembers Baksheesh Kaur.

Apart from the death of his father and brother, Harpal recalls little of those days. ‘‘But the image of bodies littering the streets is something that has stayed with me,’’ he says.

Putting behind those memories, burying the searing grief, Baksheesh then had to lead the family in the painful task of reconstructing their lives. They moved in with a son who had largely escaped the riots in his South Delhi residence; later, they shifted to the DDA flat in East of Kailash, where they now reside.

By the time they managed to get their share of compensation—Rs 3.3 lakh—eight years had passed by. Harpal had had to give up his studies to support his family; today, he drives taxis and does other odd jobs.

Just as life seemed to be coming together, calamity struck again. In 1992, Baksheesh’s son Harbhajan—Harpal’s elder by two years—was shot dead in an encounter with the police on the outskirts of Delhi. ‘‘He was with a friend, who was a militant. Harbhajan was caught in the crossfire and paid with his life,’’ says Harpal.

Forgiveness should not come easily to people like Baksheesh, but it does. ‘‘I hope the people who incited the mobs get punished, but I bear no hatred towards anybody anymore. I just wish no one has to go through what I went through,’’ she says.

Siddhartha Sarma

Questions But no Answers

EVERY afternoon, Vikramjit Singh takes leave from the computer firm that employs him in Nehru Place and heads back home to help his mother Gurbaksh fill up water from a tanker. The street they live on, unlike the rest of East of Kailash, does not get piped water. Vikramjit isn’t sure why, has never asked.

The 26-year-old learnt early in life that not all questions life throws up comes with neatly tagged answers.

If there were answers to be had, other questions would be top of the mind. Why, for instance, were his father and grandfather hacked to death in 1984? Why did his mother have to educate him and his sister by working as a Grade IV employee in UCO Bank? Why did relatives cheat them of compensation? Why did he have to quit studies after Class XII?

All the questions were born on that terrible night of 1984, when a mob broke into their Gandhinagar residence and hacked the two elder male members of the family. Gurbaksh and her mother-in-law managed to smuggle out Vikramjit and his sister through a backdoor and fled to a relative’s house in West Delhi. There they stayed till the army came in.

‘‘At first I used to string beads for a local firm for a living,’’ remembers Gurbaksh. ‘‘The UCO Bank job happened only in 1990.’’

Simultaneously, the family faced the rigours of filing FIRs, queuing up for compensation, acquiring a house, building a home. Unable to bear seeing his mother trying to make both ends meet on her meagre earnings, Vikramjit gave up studies after Class XII, only recently acquiring a BA (Pass) degree from Delhi University and subsequently a job with a computer firm.

‘‘If my father had lived, I would not have had to see my mother addressed in an undignified manner by her superiors at work. Our relatives would not have cheated us of more than a lakh of the compensation money,’’ smoulders Vikramjit.

‘‘I do not care what happens to the politicians when the Commission report comes out. I never saw them and they do not know of me. The people who attacked us, my mother says, were our neighbours. But that was then… Now all I want is my mother to get some rest after these 20-odd years,’’ Vikramjit says.

His mother has always advised him to avoid nursing hatred towards specific communities. Now, he says, gussa aata hai, but only when he sees his mother working even after suffering a stroke. Politics? Terrorism? Vikramjit has no time for all that.

Siddhartha Sarma

Life After Death

GURPAL Singh Kalsi is a worried man. At this precise moment, there might be other 26-year-olds who are as worried, but chances are his concerns are a world away from the romance-career-travel thought cycle of his contemporaries.

Gurpal has been taking care of his family—his mother, younger brother and sister—since he was 16. Twenty-one years ago, all four earning members of Gurpal’s family were killed. Worry has been almost a constant companion since then.

But money is not the primary of his worries. Nor is the erratic water supply at the DDA flat his family has occupied for more than 10 years now. It is the authorities’ habitual harassment of local youths at the slightest hint of Sikh-related trouble that worries Gurpal.

‘‘In 1996, the police picked up my uncle Maha Singh—he was a student of Class X at that time—on some pretext and beat him senseless,’’ alleges Gurpal.

Protests his mother, ‘‘If we were going to be following the path of violence and hatred, why would we be trying to lead this honest existence?’’

Since 1984, Surjit Kaur has been working as a peon with the New Delhi Municipal Corporation to support her three children. The youngest of them was born seven months after her husband was burnt alive.

Gurpal himself started working as a driver when he was 16, saving money in his mother’s name till he could buy his own vehicle to drive. In these 10 years, he has sponsored his brother’s computer education and an ongoing college degree.

‘‘I am very busy, I want to secure a job with the police for my brother,’’ he says, standing before a mirror in a tiny but scrupulously clean room, tying his turban. ‘‘As for myself, there’s no time to dream. I’d be happy if I could get myself a permanent job as a driver.’’

Neha Sinha