1984 - The Bloodied Landscape

Patwant Singh, Sikh Review, November 1996

Vengeance was in the air and it took its terrible toll on the morning of October 31, 1984, at 9.18 a.m. Its victim was Indira Gandhi, shot down by her two Sikh bodyguards as she walked on the flower-lined footpath which connected her residence with the office. I was in bed with fever that morning when my secretary, Indrani Mehra brought me the news. I knew deep within me that the whirlwind would follow and the communal fires banked by wayward politicians, religious bigots and media propagandists, would forever change the nation’s social and political landscape.

I asked Indrani to call Jagjit, Gurbachan and Arjan and suggest that we meet that afternoon to discuss what we could do to keep things calm. We agreed to make our position on what had happened very clear: that we could not condone assassinations as solutions to political problems. I asked Brigadier (Retd.) Sukhjit Singh, a highly decorated army officer and scion of Kapurthala State, to join us. We met in my house at 3.30 and agreed to issue a press release which said in part:

No society, least of all a society like ours with its long tradition of spiritualism, scholarship and humanism, can allow black deeds of murderous folly to destroy its civilised fabric. We condemn in unequivocal terms the dastardly attempt on the life of the Prime Minister, Smt. Indira Gandhi, to which she tragically fell victim. We consider such an act, and what it is likely to trigger off, a grave threat to the country’s integrity and unity... We condemn in the harshest possible terms all those who feel that co-existence between the communities is not possible, or who will use such occasions of tragedy and national trauma to sow further the seeds of communal hatred...

We went over all the assumptions, assessments and analyses of the likely spin-offs from the tragedy. Interestingly enough, Jagjit Aurora doubted if a crime by two Sikhs could mean that all Sikhs were in danger. I felt it could. Given the backdrop against which the tragedy occurred, a conflagration in which Sikh would be at the receiving end was more than likely. One of the steps, we decided to take was to call President Zail Singh, to make him understand how important it was to prevent a backlash against the Sikhs who lived outside Punjab. We arranged to meet him next day at 12.15 p.m.

It was 6.30 p.m. by the time Arjan left, and he was followed soon after by Jagjit and Sukhjit. But within ten minutes all three were back. Arjan had been flagged down by a car less than 500 yards from the house, and the people in it were decent enough to tell him that crowds were on the rampage further up the street and it would be wise to turn back. The other two had a similar experience. They had seen a Sikh-owned taxi in flames, which a passing crowd had set alight. The ‘seeds of communal hatred’ were beginning to sprout.

Well before our meeting with the President next day, we had come fact to face with a brutal fact: that if the earlier incidents against the Sikhs were spontaneous, the disturbances which engulfed the Capital now were part of a larger plan. Its goal, which came to light later, was the subjugation of the Sikhs through large-scale massacre and state-sponsored terror, and for it to succeed the pogrom would be allowed to proceed unchecked for three nights and four days.

We assembled in my house on the morning of November 1 to drive to a meeting which would prove a charade from the very start. The setting itself, Edwin Lutyens’s monumental palace, designed for the Imperial Viceroys and set in 250 acres of landscaped gardens, was far removed from the Indian reality unfolding around it. I was reminded of the words (were they mocking our mission?) carved on the Jaipur column that stands on the palace grounds:

In Thought Faith
In Word Wisdom
In Deed Courage
In Life Service -
So may India be great.

These were once described as a ‘noble epitaph for British rule and fitting counsel for the future masters of India.’ Another line, recording the consistency with which each of these virtues has been ignored by the new ‘masters’ of Independent India’s destiny, should be added to update it as an appropriate epitaph for the Republic, whose President’s ‘wisdom’ and ‘courage’ we were about to experience.

The next hour in the study was as surrealistic as something dreamt up by Salvador Dali. Opening the discussion, I emphatically spelt out for Zail Singh the violence which was overtaking the Sikhs throughout the city. He, as President, was morally and constitutionally bound to put an end to it.

He said he did not have the powers to intervene.

We were momentarily silenced by this astounding remark.

‘You mean to tell us’, I said, ‘that if the nation is going up in flames and people are being butchered in the streets, you have no power to stop the anarchy and bloodshed?’

There was no answer.

When we suggested he speak forcefully to the new Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi - whom he had sworn in the previous evening after side-stepping several procedures and proprieties expected of the President - he said he would do so in the next three or four days because he wanted to ‘give him some time’. ‘Bloods is being spilt on the streets and you want three or four days to talk to the Prime Minister!’

He relented and said he would have a word with him that afternoon.

But he did not.

We told him to go on the air, use radio and television and make a stirring plea for sanity and balance.

He nodded glumly (but did nothing). When Jagjit asked him whether the Army would be called in to restore order, he said he was not in contact with the Home Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao and suggested that Aurora should talk to him! It was like a bad dream. When we asked him how he would feel if any of his family were in such danger as Sikhs are all over Delhi - we did not know then that they were being massacred in many other states and in the trains as well - he did not answer. Nor did he respond to our suggestion that he should call all the Chief Ministers and heads of the Union Territories who had arrived in New Delhi and tell them that he would take the most serious view of any transgressions against the Sikhs in their states. He did not do it.

I told him that even as we sat talking, crowds everywhere were whipping up a frenzy with the slogan khoon ka badla khoon (blood for blood) and that he should demand that the police put a stop to it. The slogan-shouting continued unchecked for days.

As we were leaving, an aide told him that the Home Ministry had decided to call in the army. This was another of the many lies we would hear at the highest levels of administration.

I returned home to find an urgent message from I.K. Gujral, an old friend and brother of painter Satish Gujral, asking me to ring him back, which I did. He told me not to let Jagjit drive back to his house - which was quite near his own - because there was chaos on the streets. No Sikh was safe on them. He said he was coming over to work out a plan for action. (Gujral wrote in his diary that night: ‘Delhi is burning. There are reports of trains arriving with corpses - it is like 1947. General Aurora spent the night with us. The hero of 1971 could not sleep in his own house in Delhi.’)

Over lunch that day Gujral, Aurora and I decided to go and see Rao, the Home Minister who in the Indian Cabinet is in charge of the police, the intelligence agencies and maintenance of law and order. We found him at home at 3 p.m. looking impassive and seemingly without a care. In its own way this meeting too was an uncanny replay of our earlier experience with the President.

We asked him if the army was being called in.

‘It will be here in the evening.’

‘How is it being deployed?" asked Aurora.

‘The Area Commander will meet the Lt. Governor for this purpose’.

Aurora suggested the setting up of a Joint Control Room to co-ordinate the army and police actions, with Rao monitoring events from hour to hour.

‘I will look into it.’

Anyone who has dealt with any government functionary in India should know what that means! We knew. The Army was not called till the night of November 3. Had it been given charge of Delhi on the first day, 3,000 Sikhs would not have died, nor would their homes, shops, factories, taxis, trucks and places of worship have been set to the torch, under the indulgent eyes of the Administration and a partisan police force. The killing took many forms. Large crowds would seize individuals, pour kerosene or petrol on them and burn them alive. Another variation was to put tyres soaked in petrol around the necks of victims, who were held down by crowds while the tyres were lit with burning torches.

Early on the morning of November 2, Romesh Thapar and Rolf and Jeanne Gauffin, the Swedish Charge d’ Affaires and his wife arrived and said they had come to take me to the Swedish Embassy. ‘It is unsafe for you to stay in your home,’ Rold told me. But though I was touched by their concern, I refused.

Rajni Kothari, a respected political scientist (and not a Sikh), writing of those five days, recorded that women were ‘forced to witness in full the torturous methods - pulling out of limbs and eyes, tearing off hair, beards set on fire, piercing of bowels and kidneys with sharp weapons - through which their menfolk were put to death. Ivan Fera, who has reported on this aspect the best, sums it up well: "certain images had to be burned into the psyche" (Lokayan 3/1, 1985)

Writing in the same issue of Lokayan, Raj Thapar said: ‘You can’t call the killer homo sapiens. It has to be another mix. Because nowhere in the world has it happened quite in this way. Hitler organised mass-killing, but kept it away from the population, training the monsters separately, in a long unending chain of command’.

She continued:

How did a train arrive at Sunlight Colony station and disgorge its population of monsters, who burnt and killed and mauled and maimed at breakneck speed and then got on to that waiting train, which set off as the job was completed? Who gave the orders for that train, who brought those men, who equipped them?

Or how was the train stopped at Shahdara station and Sikhs pulled out and slaughtered? They say the station platforms were littered with the symbols of our savagery, up from Madhya Pradesh across the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, all the way to Bokaro...

And what of the Sikh view? In another article in Lokayan Darshan Singh Maini observed:

In Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s case, the entire state machinery was shamelessly used, particularly during the last few years of her life, to create a halo of destiny and ‘divinity’. Here was a pure politician who would be saviour and Goddess!... And since she assumed all the airs and trappings of a ‘goddess’ in the eyes of the common person, her assassination brought into play all those lethal impulses and meanness of the spirit that go with a charismatic politics divorced from vision... The mob and the leader had achieved a union of dark energies and wills. A whole river of Sikh blood was deeded for the ‘ceremony’ of immersion.

But the deed was done. The blackout of the collective conscience of elected officials, administrators, police, editors and bigots of every religion and persuasion will long haunt the country, even if the guilt of those who masterminded the killings leave them undisturbed. The blood on Delhi’s streets had yet to dry and the spirals of smoke were still rising from half-burnt bodies when glib explanations and justification (‘it was the people’s grief and anger expressing itself’) started coming in.

Sukhjit and I went to see the President again on the evening of November 6 - this time to seek his intervention in bringing the criminals to book and to ask for help for the victims. It was like talking to a non-existent person. ‘Meanwhile,’ as Maini put it, ‘Sikh homes and hearth across the length and breadth of this great land remained cold and unlit, the Sikh hearts in torment and travail. And all this, my countrymen, during the blood-stained Presidency of a Sikh!’

We fared no better with the Home Minister, who in seven years would become the Prime Minister of India. Gurbachan and I went to see him on the morning of November 10, on the same mission that had taken Sukhjit and me to Zail Singh. The niceties were maintained, tea was served, the appropriate expressions of concern were adopted, but the outcome was no different from the uncaring and unfeeling response of the President.

Contrast this response with the alacrity and concern with which the government acted immediately after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and you get a better idea of how India’s politics have been criminalised since then. In 1948, All India Radio had delayed the announcement of Mahatma Gandhi’s death by almost three-quarters of an hour to give the government time to deploy the security forces to contain a backlash, in case his killer was a Muslim. From the Governor-General downwards - Mountbatten was still in office - everyone had moved swiftly to contain any possible violence.

In 1984 the state-owned TV network helped raise the level of hostility against the Sikhs by mesmerising viewers with pictures of crowds demanding ‘blood for blood’ after the news of Indira Gandhi’s death - the blood of all Sikhs, as it turned out. And this was done under the auspices of H.K.L. Bhagat, the Congress Minister for Information and Broadcasting, against whom accusing fingers for his complicity in the killings - quite distinct from his role as the broadcasting minister - have been pointed by several enquiry commissions. He has been protected by successive Prime Ministers and still continues as a senior functionary of the Congress Party!

On the evening of November 2 a few friends who had come to cover Indira Gandhi’s funeral, among them John Fraser of Canada’s Globe and Mail, Shyam Bhatia of London’s Observer and Joseph Lilyveld of the New York Times, were with me when news was brought that my farmhouse and the one next door that I had helped Rasil build, had been burned down. A mob with barrels of oil had come in trucks at around eleven in the morning and, after ransacking paintings, wall-hangings, prints, ceramics and over five hundred books, had poured kerosene over the furnishings and woodwork and set everything alight in two gigantic bonfires. When I went there three days later I could see, in the burnt-out hulks of the buildings extensions of the lengthening shadows which were falling over India, and it suddenly seemed pointless to pretend that life could go on as before. We sold our properties soon after that.

Not everyone had decency and goodness torn out of them in those days of India’s shame. My friends Rajeswar Dayal, the former Foreign Secretary, and his wife Susheela had dropped to see me in couple of days after Indira Gandhi’s funeral, wondering how they could show their concern at the injustice done to the Sikhs. Their most significant contribution, I told them, would be to persuade the government to set up an impartial commission of enquiry to identify those who had planned and directed the killings. If this was not done and the guilty were allowed to go unpunished, militant Sikhs would wreak a terrible vengeance for the crimes. It was clear by then that several Congress MPs, party officials and field workers had gone around putting markings on Sikh homes and businesses to facilitate the work of the mobs. A partisan police force had allowed the atrocities to be committed, while other government agencies and dealers had supplied thousands of barrels of kerosene - always in short supply in India - to help the arsonists with their job.

Rajeswar Dayal understood it all. And he worked hard at it. Failing to get the government to enquire into the killings, he helped set up an independent Citizen’s Commission with a former Chief Justice of India as its Chairman and former Commonwealth, Home and Defence Secretaries and himself as members. The report of the five-member Commission was a damning indictment of the ‘masters’ of modern India. Interestingly, when the Commission’s members wished to talk to the Home Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao was not available. Nor was he when, after the report’s compilation, they wanted to present it to him in person. His arrogance towards them, who had done more for India than he, was appalling.

Rajiv Gandhi’s actions also lacked foresight and conviction in the weeks and months following the November massacres. Even before showing a similar discourtesy to members of the Citizen’s Commission by refusing to meet them, he took no note of the report on the killings, Who Are the Guilty, compiled by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights and the People’ Union for Civil Liberties. Members of these groups had, with exemplary courage, waded into the thick of the disturbances, recording the complicity of the Congress functionaries, the deliberate dereliction of the duty by the police, the cruelly calculating way in which elected and administrative officials had ignored the phone calls and personal warnings of these two bodies. They were men and women of substance: lawyers, academics, journalists and civil rights activists. Not one of them was a Sikh, and those who had responded to the crisis had done so as human beings in an inhuman situation. But their report was ignored by the Prime Minister. The President of Delhi Congress Committee went up a step further. She called it a ‘pack of lies’ and warned those who had prepared it. They ignored her.

On November 19 Rajiv Gandhi rationalised the killings at a huge public rally in which he made the astonishing statement that ‘when a big tree falls the earth shakes’. Whoever wrote it into his speech did him a disservice and he himself was not perceptive enough to strike it out. Before the December 1984 General Elections the massive advertising campaign of the Congress party brazenly provoked anti-Sikh feelings. This unethical, ill-advised and crude campaign was cleared at the highest level. But even if Rajiv Gandhi was unaware of its thrust, which he could not have been, he should have stopped it after the first item appeared. He did not. To add to the disgust and anger of the Sikhs and other right-thinking people, some of the Congress leaders who had been named in Who are the Guilty were not only given Parliamentary tickets to fight the elections but were made Ministers in Rajiv Gandhi’s Cabinet.

The most extraordinary policy decision that seemed to have been secretly taken by his government was to discourage the judiciary and law enforcement agencies from identifying and punishing the guilty. Eight years and four Prime Ministers later, ten persons have been convicted for the murder of 2,733 people (these are official figures) - with the prominent ones named in Who Are the Guilty deliberately left out. They - the politicians, police officials, administrators and pliant judges - have been rewarded instead.

For a brief and exciting period of his Prime Ministership, Rajiv Gandhi redeemed himself. In a statesmanlike move he signed a historic memorandum of Settlement with Harcharan Singh Longowal on July 24, 1985. It was a magnificent bid to bring Punjab back from where the unprincipled politics of the time had taken it.

I met Rajiv Gandhi two weeks for before the Punjab elections. When Rajni Kothari and I called on him at his office in the South Block of the Secretariat - it was crawling with gun-toting security men. The ante-rooms were crowded but we were taken to his secretary’s room - next to his own - and were shown in within a few minutes. He looked fit and at ease but soon went over the top when we brought up the subject of the guilty men of 1984. Two of them, known to have led the mobs during the massacre, had recently been shot dead by Sikh militants, and with this on his mind Rajiv Gandhi turned on Kothari and said angrily:

‘I will hold you responsible if any more killings of this kind take place.’ (Rajni Kothari as the President of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties had jointly published Who Are the Guilty, which had named the two who had been killed in retribution.)

‘If the Sikhs are still in India, Mr Gandhi’, I intervened, ‘it is because of men like Rajni Kothari and others who showed impartiality and integrity during those days of November.’ I also said that it would a good principle to hold the killers and the colluders responsible for the crimes and not those trying to expose them.

Things settled down after a while and we made suggestions which would strengthen the detente the Accord had ushered in. We said that Madhya Pradesh’s governor, Arjun Singh, a former Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh who had, with rare tact and skill made the pact possible, should stay on as Governor for another year to ensure its implementation. Since he had earned nation-wide praise for it, he would have a stake in ensuring its success. We also suggest that several major industries should be established in Punjab for channelising the energies of its hardworking people into the more constructive pursuits, especially since the mechanisation of farming had left an increasing number of strapping young men with little else to turn to. As an adjunct to this, we stressed the need for a major institute in Punjab which could train its people - who already have an aptitude for technical innovativeness - into industrial designers. We mentioned a whole range of other possibilities as we were convinced that merely to luxuriate in the aftermath of the Accord would be counter-productive. People had to be convinced of the new dynamics at work in the state.

None of these suggestions was realised. The Governor was transferred out of the State within weeks and just about every other possibility was ignored. The oppressively opinionated circle of advisors around Rajiv Gandhi took over, and the Accord was effectively killed. Though it was a mistake on Rajiv Gandhi’s part to hold the elections to the Assembly so soon after the Accord (against the advice of Longowal), he showed decorum and restraint throughout the period prior to the polls on September 25 by preventing official machinery from being misused to favour the Congress. The Akalis’ convincing victory was an endorsement of the electorate’s approval of the Accord. After formation of the Ministry and with hopes for the future beginning to rise, thing began to unravel. The Centre’s shifting embrace now encompassed other ideas which had more to do with undoing the Accord. And they succeeded. Rajiv Gandhi was neither shrewd enough to see through the machinations of those around him, nor possessed of the staying power to implement what he had initiated. The resulting disenchantment led to a resurgence of militancy.