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Revisiting 1984
Times
Jagmohan Singh
Kalam Nishan Singh
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Ever since that
early winter of genocide in Delhi, it has been one long
Orwellian age for the Sikhs. As India continues to choose
courting shame instead of dispensing justice and owning up
collective guilt, little infants are maturing into young adults,
their questions still haunting. These children born of the ashes
of a soulless society burning people on the roads seek answers.
Still! |
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You
don't know Kulbir Kaur. And you also don't know Kulbir Kaur's
mother. So how could you know Kulbir Kaur's two-months-old daughter?
We don't expect you to, honestly. All we fear for is what will
Kulbir Kaur's daughter know 20 years from now? Will it be something
for which she will have an issue to settle with the Indian state?
Should the Indian state be bothered about this bundle of a child?
For an answer,
rewind to 1984. Kulbir Kaur was herself all of two-months-old then.
Her mother carried her in her lap just as Kulbir was scooping up her
kid carefully. It was easier for Kulbir to scoop up the kid. She was
at a book release ceremony in Chandigarh. The weather was turning
outside, the yellowing leaves were falling, and no trees were
shaking.
But back on that
not so wintry November 1 night, it wasn't so calm. There was noise
on the streets and they weren't talking weather. A tree had fallen,
and the earth was shaking. Kulbir's mother was in a train
compartment, hanging on to her dear life, the two-months-old in her
lap. Outside, they were burning her husband, alive. She did not step
down from the compartment, something that would have alerted them to
her religion too. And then you would not have known Kulbir Kaur
altogether. They wouldn't have wasted much time in burning a
two-months-old.
 It
takes a mother to watch a husband burn to death and still protect a
future, a hope, a life, a Kulbir Kaur. It takes us a lifetime to
understand what being Kulbir Kaur means. It takes to be Kulbir
Kaur's daughter to understand how the Indian state will deal with
its guilt. To know the answer, wait another quarter century till you
meet this daughter, with a kid in her lap.
On February 23,
Kulbir Kaur was among a galaxy of intellectuals. Activist lawyer
author H S Phoolka, author journalist Manoj Mitta, top ranking
Supreme Court advocate Anupam Gupta, historian par excellence J S
Grewal, the no-mincing-words former high court judge S S Sodhi, and
Hindustan Times' Chandigarh edition's editor Kanwar Sandhu, one of
the few souls in the world of editors who still use a pen to write
than merely signing hiring and firing orders, that most
editors-turned-managers do in India now. And who considers it worth
his while to be seen at such an event instead of being at some
happening party as editors are wont to currently.
Mitta-Phoolka's
domain-breaking When A Tree Shook Delhi was being released in
its paperback avatar. With the who's who on the stage, it was
perhaps one of the best tributes to the martyrs of 1984 massacre
that the book was released by Kulbir Kaur. Her mother sat among the
audience, an occasional tear betraying the pain. It is okay to cry
sometimes. One earns that right by not stepping off the train even
when one's spouse is being burnt.
 A few minutes
later Phoolka was telling Kulbir's story. His entire speech was in
Punjabi, but he narrated the Kulbir tale in English lest it brings
the memories flooding back for Kulbir's mother. She does not
understand the language, and so many thanks to Phoolka for being so
sensitized. If only the Indian state had displayed a bit of such
sensitivity! I mean burning people alive on platforms!!
How many stories
do we need before we understand that knowing Kulbir Kaurs is
important? How many sensitivity lessons must the Indian state learn
to understand that the rehabilitation colonies set up to house the
widows of massacres should not be named Widow Colonies?
Orwellian year
was such an apt name for 1984, at least as far as the Sikhs were
concerned. "People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your
name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you
had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and
then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the
usual word."
Twenty-four
years down the line, Orwell lives on. Kulbir Kaurs keep vanishing
from our memory, but some stick on to the strange entity called
courage of conviction. Facing flak, fracas and falsehood, Sikhs keep
staring at the Indian state, telling it they are there, not ready to
die at its will.
The entire
Indian political machinery – the legislature, executive, commissions
of enquiry, judiciary, a section of the fourth estate, all have
ganged up from time to time to tell the Sikhs to forget 1984. It is
passé. Let us grow up, move forward, say the political pundits and
those who have lost the human touch, of which the tribe is growing.
 In any country,
the proceedings at the book release function in Chandigarh would
have been shocking headlines. A respected judge narrating how Sikh
judges were not allowed to hear cases against Sikh militants,
spilling beans about how army units were called from Dehradun but
the Sikh army commander was asked not to accompany them; a much
respected historian, a former vice chancellor and a former director
of India's prestigious Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla
telling how at a National History Congress soon after the genocidal
killings he was made to feel that he does not belong to this country
and the country does not belong to him.
Among the
audience were Bhai Daljit Singh Bittu, Kanwarpal Singh, Navkiran
Singh, Karnail Singh Pir Mohammed, Giani Surinder Singh (the key
witness in the case against Tytler), Kulbir Kaur, the lady who lost
her father, her mother and Baba Sewa Singh from Khadur Sahib who
took care of her from birth to this day.
Kanwar Sandhu
moderated the panel discussion, commenting prior to 1984 killings,
terrorism was a rural phenomenon, whereas after this, it acquired
the urban touch. He said the carnage took terrorism to
Delhi
and provided a kind of legitimacy to it. More importantly, it
snapped the intrinsic chord between India and the Sikhs.
Co-author of the
book Mitta underlined the irony of a Prime Minister making a belated
apology that admitted wrong doing but exonerated his own party and
the then government. (As for the fact that the Congress thought it
fit to make a Sikh PM extend the apology to the community, the less
said the better).
It is high time
the Sikhs start taking names also. Mitta did, at least. He
underlined the blatantism with which men like Ranga Nath Mishra and
Nanavati peppered their findings --- gross abuse of authority was
committed, the police was wrong, and things of that kind --- but
still the political leadership is not even implicated, what to talk
of indictment.
 Justice S S
Sodhi had some shocking revelations to make: he said as per reliable
information gathered by him, the Indian army unit in
Meerut
was asked to stand by, as that was the nearest point from
Delhi.
When it was learnt that more than 80 percent of the army men were
Sikhs, they were not called. Then the unit from Dehradun was asked
to stand by. After a lot of vacillation, it was called, but the
Divisional Commander, who happened to be a Sikh, was asked not to
accompany the forces. He urged for further investigation into
this.
As for the
judiciary of India, here was a judge saying that he, as one from the
hallowed portals of justice dispensing system, was "ashamed about
the working of Rangathan Mishra Commission." "We must remember that
the disgusting manner in which this justice was functioning can be
gauged from the fact that a person of the caliber of Justice Sikri
had to dissociate from the commission."
Then followed
another bombshell: Dwelling further on the incidents prior to
November 1984, he said that no Sikh judge was trusted to deal with
terrorists or those who were perceived as terrorists.
In any democracy
with a free media, this would have been a very serious statement
worthy of being conveyed to the people in appropriately huge font
size. But the Indian media is even freer. It largely exercised its
right to remain oblivious of the development. Bigger font sizes are
these days claimed by starlets and editors turned TV's new stars
chatting about food, wines, or walking and talking the starlets, and
whenever that is not possible, men like Kamal Nath and forget asking
if the nation lost its conscience in the early winter of 1984.
Phoolka said
during the course of the Nanavati Commission proceedings, he was to
scrutinize close to two lakh pages of documents, which have been
archived and stored by the Nanakshahi Trust. "We vouch for every
single word in the book and every word can stand testimony and
verification even in a court of law. It contains truth and nothing
but the truth."
He said he never
saw himself as an author, but always as an activist. "The struggle
of the activist still continues. With the leaders, police and the
judiciary arraigned against you, it is only the activist and the
lawyer who can contest and fight. For me and for us here, the fight
has to go on."
"Aa sikandar
tun teer azma, ham jigar ajmaayen….
 "It was this
which kept me on. The hope taught by the Sikh Gurus has been my
abiding strength. I will continue to fight till the last."
Dr J S Grewal
said to find out a mono-causal relationship between the developments
in Punjab and another event would not be proper as there were
multiple causes. He said that a major fall out of November 1984 was
that it provided the rationale for militancy and that it created a
schism between the Sikhs and the rest of India. He mentioned how as
the President of the Indian History Congress soon after the riots,
he went to Calcutta and felt that "the country did not belong to me
and I did not belong to the country." Words the inherent shame of
which will drown a nation. Unless it is a nation drowned in shame.
Ms. Daruwala,
Chair, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, underlined the problems
with the new Police Act of Punjab while Anupam Gupta did a
comprehensive analysis of the book.
Referring to the
complicity of the Akali Dal leaders in the retraction of evidence in
a crucial '84 carnage case against Congress leader H K L Bhagat,
Manoj Mitta made a significant observation, "that a communal party
cannot be trusted to protect the interests of its own community."
But perhaps it
was that one minute speech of Kulbir Kaur which alone would have
been worth the entire exercise. A narration, a simple linear
narration of what happened. 'They burned my father, alive, on the
platform. My mother watched. She did not do a thing. Thank God, she
did not do a thing. Because if she had, you would have never known
they burned my father. Then I too would not have been here, and you
would not have known that I was the two-months-old in her arms.'
But then, Kulbir,
oh dear Kulbir, both of you in fact – the two-months-old in your
mother's lap 24 years ago, and you the mother with a two-months-old
in your lap, we still are shameless enough not to know you. God
bless the likes of Phoolka, the people like Mitta, because of whom
we know you are the window to peep into a community's soul.
Or we would have
thought that it was just a tree that fell, and it was just the earth
that shook. Not the soul of the Indian nation state. It is much too
hard. Doesn't bother about two-months-old.
One
panelist, whose name was displayed on the dais and who was
conspicuous by his absence was the Finance Minister of Punjab, Manpreet Singh Badal. The moderator Kanwar Sandhu initially said he
will come but later informed that "due to an urgent budget meeting"
he may not come and he passed a snide remark that "he hoped that
that was the truth".
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FOR THE RECORD
Manoj
Mitta: Both Manoj Mitta and H S Phoolka made out a
principled case for reforms since in many a case they
investigated, the superiors claimed that they could not take
action because the juniors either failed to report to them or
reported inadequately, whereas the facts are that seniors handed
down instructions and themselves led police forces to disarm
Sikhs in the police and those who had private arms for self-defence. Manoj
Mitta enunciated what the community has long felt but what was
appreciated the way he identified the spot for a Memorial to the
memory of those who were maimed, looted, raped, stabbed and
mostly burnt alive on the roads of India's celebrated national
capital Delhi. Block 32 of Trilokpuri where more than 400 Sikhs
were killed and 30 women were abducted and subjected to gangrape,
barely ten kilometers away from the police headquarters. The
fiery feisty Teesta Seetalvad is converting the Gulbarga Society
in Ahmedabad into a memorial.
S S Sodhi: As per routine, judges were asked to inspect
districts and Justice Sodhi said he was assigned
Patiala.
The Nabha prison was a high security prison and most of the
terrorists were jailed there. As there were a number of
complaints of torture made to him during his visit there, he
entrusted the task to Justice Cheema to prepare a report. On
the basis of Justice Cheema's report, 25 police personnel were
indicted for torture and the Barnala government paid
compensation to the victims. Justice Cheema's commission of
enquiry report formed the basis for all this. Justice Sodhi
said that what was sad is that as he had filed that report,
inspite of his impeccable record, he was not promoted as a
judge.
Justice S
S Sodhi: No one wants 1984 to be repeated. But India has
already witnessed two repetitions. These would continue to
recur, if the skeletons in the cupboards are not let out, and if
required, through the instrument of a panel like the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of South Africa.
Dr. J S
Grewal: The demand for Khalistan in pre-1947 was perhaps for
a Sikh state as a counterpoise to Pakistan. In pre-1978, there
was no call for Khalistan. Post 1984, too there was no call for
it, even from Bhindranwale, and he said that I have studied all
his speeches. November 1984 provided the rationale for
Khalistan, albeit for a small period of time.
Kanwar
Sandhu: The man who is the Prime Minister of India now took
care to buy a house in Chandigarh's Sector 11 immediately after
the 1984 genocide, a clear indication of the understanding that
the connection between India and the Sikhs had snapped.
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27
February 2008
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Read Also
When
A Tree Shook Delhi
