Oh, That Other
Hindu Riot Of Passage
By Khushwant
Singh
07 November, 2004
Outlook
Magazine
There are two anniversaries so deeply
etched in my mind that every year they come around I recollect with
pain what happened on those two days. They occurred 20 years ago. One
is October 31, when Mrs Gandhi was gunned down by her two Sikh security
guards. The other is the following day, when the 'aftermath' consummated
itself: frenzied Hindu mobs, driven by hate and revenge, finally killed
nearly 10,000 innocent Sikhs across north India down to Karnataka. Four
years later, Mrs Gandhi's assassins Satwant Singh and Kehar Singh paid
the penalty for their crime by being hanged to death in Tihar jail.
Twenty years later,
the killers of 10,000 Sikhs remain unpunished. The conclusion is clear:
in secular India there is one law for the Hindu majority, another for
Muslims, Christians and Sikhs who are in
minority.
October 31, 1984:
The sequence of events remains as vivid as ever. Around 11 am, I heard
of Mrs Gandhi being shot in her house and taken to hospital. By the
afternoon, I heard on the bbc that she was dead. For a couple of hours,
life in Delhi came to a standstill. Then hell broke loose-mobs yelling
khoon ka badla khoon se lenge (we'll avenge blood with blood) roamed
the streets. Ordinary Sikhs going about their life were waylaid and
roughed up. In the evening, I saw a cloud of black smoke billowing up
from Connaught Circus: Sikh-owned shops had been set on fire. An hour
later, mobs were smashing up taxis owned by Sikhs right opposite my
apartment. Sikh-owned shops in Khan Market were being looted. Over 100
policemen armed with lathis lined the middle of the road and did nothing.
At midnight, truckloads of men armed with cans of petrol attacked the
gurudwara behind my back garden, beat up the granthi and set fire to
the shrine. I was bewildered and did not know what to do. Early next
morning, I rang up President Zail Singh.
He would not come
on the phone. His secretary told me that the president advised me to
move into the home of a Hindu friend till the trouble was over. The
newly-appointed prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was busy receiving guests
arriving for his mother's funeral; home minister Narasimha Rao did not
budge from his office; the Lt Governor of Delhi had no orders to put
down the rioters. Seventy-two gurudwaras were torched and thousands
of Sikh houses looted. The next few days, TV and radio sets were available
for less than half their price.
Mid-morning, a Swedish
diplomat came and took me and my wife to his home in the diplomatic
enclave. My aged mother had been taken by Romesh Thapar to his home.
Our family lawyer, Anant Bir Singh, who lived close to my mother, had
his long hair cut off and beard shaved to avoid being recognised as
a Sikh. I watched Mrs Gandhi's cremation on TV in the home of my Swedish
protector. I felt like a Jew must have in Nazi Germany. I was a refugee
in my own homeland because I was a Sikh.
What I found most
distressing was the attitude of many of my Hindu friends. Two couples
made a point to call on me after I returned home. They were Sri S. Mulgaonkar
and his wife, Arun Shourie and his wife Anita. As for the others, the
less said the better. Girilal Jain, editor of The Times of India, rationalised
the violence: the Hindu cup of patience, he wrote, had become full to
the brim. N.C. Menon, who succeeded me as editor of The Hindustan Times,
wrote of how Sikhs had "clawed their way to prosperity" and
well nigh had it coming to them. Some spread gossip of how Sikhs had
poisoned Delhi's drinking water, how they had attacked trains and slaughtered
Hindu passengers. At the Gymkhana Club where I played tennis every morning,
one man said I had no right to complain after what Sikhs had done to
Hindus in Punjab. At a party, another gloated "Khoob mazaa chakhaya-we
gave them a taste of their own medicine." Word had gone round:
'Teach the Sikhs a lesson'.
Did the Sikhs deserve
to be taught a lesson? I pondered over the matter for many days and
many hours and reluctantly admitted that Hindus had some justification
for their anger against Sikhs. The starting point was the emergence
of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale as a leader. He used vituperative language
against the Hindus. He exhorted every Sikh to kill 32 Hindus to solve
the Hindu-Sikh problem. Anyone who opposed him was put on his hit list
and some eliminated. His hoodlums murdered Lala Jagat Narain, founder
of the Hind Samachar group of papers. They killed hawkers who sold their
papers.
The list of Bhindranwale's
victims, which included both Hindus and Sikhs, was a long one. More
depressing to me was that no one spoke out openly against him. He had
a wily patron in Giani Zail Singh who had him released when he was charged
as an accomplice in the murderof Jagat Narain. Akali leaders supported
him. Some like Badal and Barnala, who used to tie their beards to their
chins, let them down in deference to his wishes. So did many Sikh civil
servants. They lauded him as the saviour of the Khalsa Panth and called
him Sant. I am proud to say I was the only one who wrote against him
and attacked him as a hate-monger. I was on his hit list and continued
to be so on
that of his followers-for 15 long years-and was given police protection
which I never asked for.
Bhindranwale, with
the tacit connivance of Akali leaders like Gurcharan Singh Tohra, turned
the Golden Temple into an armed fortress of Sikh defiance. He provided
the Indian government the excuse to send the army into the temple complex.
I warned the government in Parliament and through my articles against
using the army to get hold of Bhindranwale and his followers as the
consequences would be grave. And so they were. Operation Bluestar was
a blunder of Himalayan proportions. Bhindranwale was killed but hailed
as a martyr. Over 5,000 men and women lost their lives in the exchange
of fire.
The Akal Takht was
wrecked.Symbolic protests did not take long coming. I was part of it;
I surrendered the Padma Bhushan awarded to me. Among the people who
condemned my action was Vinod Mehta, then editor of The Observer. He
wrote that when it came to choosing between being an Indian or a Sikh,
I had chosen to be a Sikh. I stopped contributing to his paper. I had
never believed that I had to be one or the other. I was both an Indian
and a Sikh and proud of being so. I might well have asked Mehta in return,
"Are you a Hindu or an Indian?" Hindus do not have to prove
their nationality; only Muslims, Christians and Sikhs are required to
give evidence of their patriotism.Anti-Sikh violence gave a boost to
the demand for a separate Sikh state and Khalistan-inspired terrorism
in Punjab and abroad. Amongst the worst was the blowing up of Air India's
Kanishka (June 23, 1985), which killed all its 329 passengers and crew,
including over 30 Sikhs. Sant Harchand Singh Longowal, who signed the
Rajiv-Longowal accord (July 29, 1985), was murdered while praying in
a gurudwara just three weeks later. In August 1986, General A.S. Vaidya,
who was chief of staff when Operation Bluestar took place, was gunned
down in Pune in August 1985. The killings went on unabated for almost
10 years. Terrorists ran a parallel government in districts adjoining
Pakistan which also provided them arms training and escape routes. It
is estimated that in those 10 years over 25,000 were killed. Midway,
the Golden Temple had again become a sanctuary for criminals. This time
the Punjab police led by K.P.S. Gill was able to get the better of them
with the loss of only two lives in what came to be known as Operation
Black Thunder (May 13-18, 1988). The terrorist movement petered out
as the terrorists turned gangsters and took to extortion and robbery.The
peasantry turned its back on them.
About the last action
of Khalistani terrorists was the murder of chief minister Beant Singh,
who was blown up along with 12 others by a suicide bomber on July 31,
1995, at Chandigarh.It is not surprising that with this legacy of ill-will
and bloodshed a sense of alienation grew among the Sikhs. It was reinforced
by the reluctance of successive governments at the Centre to bring the
perpetrators of the anti-Sikh pogrom of October 31 and November 1, 1984.
A growing number of non-Sikhs have also come to the conclusion that
grave injustice has been done to the Sikhs. Several non-official commissions
of inquiry-including one headed by retired Supreme Court chief justice
S.M. Sikri, comprising retired ambassadors and senior civil servants-have
categorically named the guilty. However, all that the government has
done is to appoint one commission of inquiry after another to look into
charges of minor relevance to the issue without taking any action. The
Nanavati Commission has been at it for quite some time: I rendered evidence
before it over two years ago. It has asked for further extension of
time, which has been granted till the end of this year. The only word
I can think of using for such official procrastination is disgraceful.
I have to concede
that the attitude of the bjp government led by Atal Behari Vajpayee
and L.K. Advani towards the Sikhs has been more positive than that of
the Congress, many of whose leaders were involved in the 1984 anti-Sikh
violence. Some of it may be due to its alliance with the principal Sikh
political party, the Akalis, led by Parkash Singh Badal. It also gives
them a valid excuse to criticise the Congress leadership. Nevertheless,
I welcomed the Congress party's return to power in the Centre because
it also promises a fairer deal to other minorities like the Muslims
and Christians. And I make no secret of my rejoicing over the choice
of Manmohan Singh, the first Sikh to become prime minister of India
and he in his turn selecting another Sikh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, to
head the Planning
Commission.
The dark months
of alienation are over; the new dawn promises blue skies and sunshine
for the minorities with only one black cloud remaining to be blown away-a
fair deal to families of victims of the anti-Sikh violence of 1984.
It was the most horrendous crime committed on a mass scale since we
became an independent nation. Its perpetrators must be punished because
crimes unpunished generate more criminals.