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1984, New
Delhi: did anything happen?
The Hindustan Times
was India's sole national daily which remembered to comment
editorially on the 1984 riots this month. We reproduce here the edit
published on November 3, 2007.
It was today, 23 years ago, that the
vengeful, violent horror unleashed against Sikhs in New Delhi
following the assassination of Indira Gandhi slowly began abating.
It was not that reason prevailed over the bloodthirsty mobs prowling
the alleys and gallis of Delhi but the fact that the armed forces
were out in full force as slain Prime Minister Indira Gandhi began
her final journey to Rajghat. It was her son and successor Rajiv
Gandhi who may have inadvertently triggered off the cataclysmic
events following Indira Gandhi’s death at the hands of her Sikh
bodyguards. "When a great tree falls, the earth will shake," said
Rajiv, then a political greenhorn. The lumpen mobs and their
political masters needed no further encouragement.
Over 3,000 Sikhs perished over those three fateful days. As we look
back today, we find that it is a tragedy that has had no closure.
Right in the heart of the capital, those displaced that day, those
who lost their loved ones, those who were injured still remain in a
state of suspended animation. The State has not fulfilled its
promises of compensation and rehabilitation. All the victims can
take comfort in is the fact that in 2006, India’s first Sikh Prime
Minister and head of a Congress-led government, Manmohan Singh,
publicly atoned for the violence visited on the Sikhs. The stories
of what happened to those hapless people that day are
well-documented in the Nanavati Commission’s report. But so far, we
have seen little political will to ensure that justice, howsoever
delayed, is done to these people. Only 13 people have been punished
so far, with the powerful having largely got off scot-free.
The violence was organised, as the Nanavati Commission records. Yet
today, it has become nothing more than a political football among
political parties. Political and police complicity has been proved.
Those who lived through the horror are still to come to terms with
the fact that it was not some remote killing machine that they had
to confront but friends and neighbours whom they had lived with and
who had been incited by vested interests with the blood-chilling
slogan, "Khoon ka badla khoon". It is something that the enhanced
compensation of Rs 7 lakh per family of the dead cannot erase.
It is now clear from several independent inquiries that the riots
could have been prevented had the government acted swiftly. It did
not. Subsequent governments, Congress and non-Congress, had the
chance to ensure justice for the victims. They did nothing. Even
now, the disbursal of compensation has been patchy. A generation of
Sikhs has grown up on the margins refusing to give up hope. The
story of the riots was not one of Hindus vs Sikhs. It was one of the
consequences when the State abdicates its responsibility. It is a
story that, all too sadly, is still repeated across India.
7 November, 2007
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