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Did having a Sikh PM assuage
Sikhs' hurt?
The common refrain is that justice would have helped more
WSN Bureau
 NEW
DELHI: Has the fact of a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, becoming a Prime
Minister of the country helped assuage the feeling of alienation
from the state for the Sikhs? As the Sikh community recalled the
horrors perpetrated twenty-five years ago when the streets of the
capital were ablaze and mobs with the evident backing of the police
and the ruling Congress party exacted a bloody revenge on Delhi’s
Sikh community, the religion of the PM seemed to matter little.
Even though a
large number of Sikh families never got the promised compensation,
the redemptive currency closest to the hearts of the country’s proud
Sikh community — justice — has remained in short supply.
While the rest
of the country has moved on to newer tribulations and tragedies, the
absence of justice for the victims of November 1984 has been like a
raw wound.
Unable to have
closure in the proper way, many in the community have grudgingly
seen in the Congress’ decision to pick Manmohan Singh as Prime
Minister a symbolic making of amends. “As a signalling device, it
was a useful one for the Congress to have Manmohan Singh as Prime
Minister; whatever be the circumstances of his elevation to that
office,” said the editor of Seminar, Tejbir Singh.
“Somewhere, the
fact that a Sikh has become Prime Minister — a far-fetched
possibility given that the community accounts for only 1.9 per cent
of the country’s population — indicates that there is no underlying
community discrimination.” But it is difficult to find many Sikhs
who agree to such a formulation.
“It has been
like a balm on the community,” admits H.S. Phoolka, the lawyer who
has been pursuing the carnage cases in court. At the same time, he
points to the selective amnesia in the Congress on the issue of the
party’s complicity in the Sikh carnage.
“The Congress
wants us to forget it; view it as an aberration. When they made
Manmohan Singh Prime Minister, they stepped up this rhetoric;
saying, ‘forget it now at least we have apologised and now made your
man the Prime Minister. Our answer has been that the apology came 21
years late and under the Indian legal system an apology is not a
substitute for punishment for murder. We want justice.”
Ever in denial
mode, the Congress insists that the Sikhs have moved on since 1984
and made peace with the party; having elected it to power in
Punjab
in between. “We are sensitive to the sentiments of Sikhs which is
why we dropped Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler when there were
protests from within the community against their candidature for the
Lok Sabha elections,” is the Congress refrain.
However, for
Tejbir Singh, these protests, particularly the incident of
journalist Jarnail Singh throwing a shoe at Union Home Minister P.
Chidambaram, are evidence that the issue is easy to rekindle
4
November 2009
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