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'84 accounts scattered all over
WSN Network

SAS NAGAR: Stories of 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms have scattered all over. With thousands dead came the inevitable migration of families of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere to one or the other place. With our entrenched community leaders like Prakash Singh Badal or the rest of the top brass deciding to join in the silence of the Indian ruling establishment, there has been virtually no movement to gather the various accounts of the victims.

As we ran into one such account in Mohali, next door to Chandigarh, one only wonders how many such heart-rending stories are waiting to be told.

"On November 7, 1984, I cremated 13 bodies in my locality, which had been lying in the open for three days," Harjinder Singh, one of the victims of the 1984 pogroms, recalled, his face darkening.

He now runs an atta chakki and makes cotton quilts in a makeshift shop on the roadside in Phase XI, SAS Nagar. Singh, who is also the president of November 1, 84 Riot Victims' Welfare Society, SAS Nagar, recounted the ghastly details of the riots.

"A mob brutally killed 13 Sikh families along with children in my area of Shakkarpur in Delhi.

My Muslim friend Alam Khan saved my life by giving me a hair cut and sheltering me in his house.

When I saw bodies lying in the open, I brought wood from the nearby Geeta Colony on a bullock cart and cremated them at the same area of the house, which was burnt," he said.

The trauma of those days is something Harjinder Singh will never get over. Left penniless, he, alongwith his wife and two children, took a lift on a truck and reached SAS Nagar. He stayed at Amb Sahib Gurudwara for a few days. Singh, a Panjab University graduate and a religious teacher, moved to Delhi in 1978. "We were financially sound but on November 2, my house was burnt and nothing was left except the clothes we were wearing," he said. He was allotted a house for meant for riot victims in Phase-11, SAS Nagar in 1991 and now earns a living of Rs 200 a day. Accusing the government of failing to fulfill its promises, Singh said the state government, in 1985, decided to reserve posts for pogrom victims, but it turned out to be all talk.

11 November  2009
 

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