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Eyewitness
Amitav Ghosh
 The Ghost of Indira Gandhi (1995), Amitav Ghosh, Professor at Queens
College, New York.
‘It was still and quiet, eerily so. The usual sounds of rush-hour
traffic were absent. But every so often we heard a speeding car or a
motorcycle on the main street. Later, we discovered that these
mysterious speeding vehicles were instrumental in directing the
carnage that was taking place. Protected by certain politicians,
“organisers” were zooming around the city, assembling the mobs and
transporting them to Sikh-owned houses and shops.’ ‘Apparently, the
transportation was provided free. A civil-rights report published
shortly afterward stated that this phase of violence “began with the
arrival of groups of armed people in tempo vans, scooter,
motorcycles or trucks,” and went on to say.’‘With cans of petrol
they went around the localities and systematically set fire to
Sikh-houses, shops and Gurdwaras…the targets were primarily young
Sikhs. They were dragged out, beaten up and then burned alive…In all
the affected spots, a calculated attempt to terrorise the people was
evident in the common tendency among the assailants to burn alive
Sikhs on public roads. Fire was everywhere; it was the day’s motif.
Throughout the city, Sikh houses were being looted and then set on
fire, often with their occupants still inside.’
‘A survivor – a woman who lost her husband and three sons – offered
the following account to Veena Das, a Delhi sociologist:
Some people, neighbours, said it would be better if we hid in an
abandoned house nearby. So my husband took our three sons and hid
there. We locked the house from outside, but there was treachery in
people’s hearts. Someone must have told the crowd. They baited him
to come out. Then they poured kerosene on that house. They burnt
them alive. When I went there that night, the bodies of my sons were
on the loft – huddled together.’
‘Over the next few
days, thousands of people died in Delhi alone.
Thousands more died
in other cities. The total death toll will never be known. The dead
were overwhelmingly Sikh men. Entire neighbourhoods were gutted;
tens of thousands of people were left homeless.’
Trilokpuri massacre, East Delhi Rahul Kuldip Bedi and Joseph
Maliakan of the Indian Express were the first newspaper reporters to
enter Trilokpuri on 2 November. This is what they reported:
Politics of a Pogrom, quoted in The Assassination & After (1985),
Rahul Kuldip Bedi, p51.
“Shortly after sunset on 1 November, the mob, busy in Block 32,
Trilokpuri, East Delhi, dispersed for dinner. It had built up an
appetite. Killing, burning and pillaging the 400-odd Sikh families
in the Block had, indeed left them hungry. An hour later, their
bellies full, they casually strolled back, to the two narrow lanes
in the trans-Jamuna resettlement colony, forcibly plunged into
darkness; to join those already hard at work.”
“Labouring at a
leisurely pace they split open Lachman Singh’s skull and pouring
kerosene into the gash set alight the half-alive man in front of
Gyan Devi, his wife. Balwant Singh, who tried to escape after
shaving himself, had his eyes gouged out before he too was similarly
burnt. Sarb Singh, his terror-stricken father-inlaw, watched. The
sport continued, interspersed with solicitous visits from the local
police to ensure that things were going well.”
“The calculated
carnage in Delhi and over 80 towns in the country had begun. The
pattern was similar all over, the brutality unbelievable and
barbaric, the tragedy unspeakable.
On 1 November, all
exit points from Trilokpuri have been sealed off by massive concrete
pipes. Conscientious men from the colony, armed with lathis, guarded
the pipes, barely a kilometre from two police stations – Patparganj
and Kalyanpuri – to ensure that no Sikh escapes. Also, that no one
except the police set foot into Trilokpuri.”
“Around 2 0’clock on
2 November, we enter Trilokpuri. Just about the time that the
killers, having toiled for 30 long and uninterrupted hours, were
scouring Block 32 for booty or any young Sikh that inadvertently,
they may, have overlooked. As if, around 350 Sikhs already killed
and an equal number of looted and burnt houses was not enough. A
plume of smoke spirals upwards from half-charred bodies. Two lanes
of Block 32, an area of around 500 square yards inhabited by around
450 Sikh families, is littered with corpses, the drains choked with
dismembered limbs and masses of hair. Cindered human remains lie
scattered in the first 20 yards of the first lane.
The remaining
40-yard stretch of the street is strewn with naked bodies, brutally
hacked beyond recognition. Lifeless arms hang over balconies; many
houses have bodies piled three-deep on their doorsteps. ‘Take me
away’, wails a three-year old girl, crawling from under the bodies
of her father and three brothers and stepping over countless others
lying in her one-roomed tenement, collapsing into the arms of a
reporter.”
Khushwant Singh, former MP
My Bleeding Punjab (1992), Khushwant Singh, p 93.
“I realised what Jews must have felt like in Nazi Germany. The
killing assumed the proportion of a genocide of the Sikh community.
For the first time I understood what words like pogrom, holocaust
and genocide really meant”.
“Sikh houses and shops were marked for destruction in much the same
way as those of Jews in Tsarist Russia or Nazi Germany."
Brian James & Stephen Lynas, Daily Mail 3rd November 1984
"The bodies beside the track were all Sikh, some had burned alive
others burnt to death. The Sikhs were pulled from trains by a Hindu
mob outside New Delhi to face a slow death."
Sunday Telegraph, 11th November 1984
"Victims speak of mobs led by notoriously unruly Youth Congress
activists armed with voters lists from which Sikh homes and
businesses could be identified. How did kerosene materialise so
efficiently? Why did the police declare open season on Sikh shops?"
Guardian, 3rd November 1984
"Hardly any soldiers were to be seen in the streets of the capital."
India Today 15th November 1984
"Days of violence and loot and murder left the national capital
dazed - an unprecedented holocaust. Criminally led hoodlum killed
Sikhs, looted or burnt homes and properties while the police
twiddled their thumbs."
The Times, 5th November 1984
"Many people complained that, in some cases, the police were not
merely hanging back, but giving active support."
Nicholas Nugent of the BBC’s account
Rajiv Gandhi – Son of a Dynasty, (1990), Nicholas Nugent, p25-27
"Particular targets of the mobs were the many taxis driven by Sikhs.
More than two thousand cars, taxis and trucks were burnt during the
three-day orgy of vengeance and violence.
The initial ‘knee-jerk’ response had given way to what appeared to
be a more systematic and organised outbreak of blood-letting. Sikhs
were stabbed, burned and butchered to death. Sikh taxi drivers were
pulled from their vehicles and killed, their bodies left on the
road. A well-organised group spent several hours putting to death
all identifiable Sikhs living in the suburb of Trilokpuri.
Guardian, London, 29th April 1991
The Guardian newspaper’s India correspondent, Derek Brown, observing
this pitiable state, wrote
of the "long-suffering people of Punjab from which order, official
morality, and justice have fled."
Economic and Political Weekly,
8 December 1984.
"The Delhi violence was well planned and well organised. It would
have burst forth even if Indira Gandhi had been alive".
Paul Brass, Political Scientist
'We Have No Orders
To Save You' – State Participation and Complicity in Communal
Violence in Gujarat (2002), Human Rights Watch.
“the mood in India ‘bore an ominous resemblance to that of the
1930’s Germany, likening the orchestrated urban pogroms against
Sikhs and Muslims55 to so many Kristallnachts.’
Cynthia Keppley Mahmood Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Maine, Orono, USA
‘Though some will find the analogy with Nazi Germany here too
extreme, both the explicit targeting of Sikhs as traitors following
Operation Bluestar and the clear earmarking of Sikh residence and
business in the post-assassination carnage speak to an incipient
genocidal campaign’
Lord Avebury (Chair, British Parliamentary Human Rights Group,
Letter to Mark Lennox Boyd, Junior Foreign Minister (9 April 1993)
"There is plenty of evidence to show that extra-judicial killings
are perpetrated on a large-scale by the police and security forces
in Punjab, and that the conspiracy to mass murder extends up to the
highest levels of government. "
31
October, 2007
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