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And The Alarm
Would Go, One, Two, Cha-Cha-Cha
 On October 31, 1984, I was 27 years old and I had been teaching
history at Jamia Millia Islamia for just over a year. I was living
with my parents at the time and within an hour of knowing that Mrs
Gandhi had died of her bullet wounds, I set off on my daily five
mile ride to Malcha Marg, a street in Delhi's diplomatic quarter,
Chanakyapuri, where my girl friend lived. I usually took a bus to
the Central Secretariat and then another to Sardar Patel Marg, but
that evening, I waved an autorickshaw down. I should have stayed
home but our prime ministers till that day had all died of natural
causes or were still alive—we didn't know, by default, the sensible
thing to do.
The auto stopped moving near Kamal Cinema because of the traffic.
As we inched along, street lights lit up men with lathis. I remember
all of them as smiling.
The road that led to the Safdarjung Club was jammed and there was
shouting. I looked out in time to see a driver being pulled out of a
stranded dtc bus, pulled down, actually, from the high door by the
driver's seat. Then the autowallah found a path down the wrong side
of the road and we crossed the Ring Road into Chanakyapuri.
This was before satellite telecasts or 24-hour news channels, but
you didn't need television to tell that something was wrong. bbc
World Service reported that Sikhs were being attacked. I thought
about staying the night, then decided to get back to my parents.
There were no autos puttering about when it was time to go home so I
looked for a taxi.
The drivers from the mainly Sikh taxi stand in Malcha Marg Market
had mostly disappeared. The one taxi available was driven by a
short-haired man without a beard. He agreed to make the journey
provided we went the long way round: Shanti Path, Rao Tula Ram Marg
and then home via the Outer Ring Road. He thought that would be the
safer route because there was trouble in the city. He was wrong.
Unpunished pogroms like '84 only license murderers to order up more
of the same.
 There was trouble to spare on the Outer Ring Road. Near Munirka, the
road narrowed because hundreds of men had taken it over. We inched
along, windows rolled down to show we had nothing to hide.
Headlights and smudgy streetlights lit up men with lathis and in my
memory all of them are smiling or laughing. Certainly the man who
stopped the taxi was smiling. He asked the driver if there was
anyone else in the car when it was clear there wasn't. The driver
shook his head, so the smiling man made him open the boot. I heard
the boot open and close, then the man was back at my window. He
stuck his head in and peered into the dark leg space between the
front and back seats. "Chalo," he said and we made our way slowly
through that vigilante crowd.
Elsewhere on the streets, the madness erupted. Those who drive the
lifeline of our commerce, the Sikh truckers, became the target of an
unreasonable ire.
It was nearly ten o'clock by the time I got home but my father who
opened the door didn't seem anxious. My parents had guests. Two
young men, younger than I was then, were housed in the back bedroom.
They were salesmen, friends, one Sikh, one not. Soon after I had
left for Malcha Marg, the bus they were on was stopped at Kamala
Nehru College, across the road from my parents' house, and the Sikhs
pulled out. The way the non-Sikh boy told the story, the mob was
distracted by a fuller bus, more prey, and the two of them managed
to slip away from the chaos of marooned commuters and marauding Sikh
killers. They crossed Siri Fort Road and
walked into Anand Lok where my parents lived. They wouldn't be able
to do it now: there's a gate there, permanently locked, but this was
1984, and the gated locality was a few years in the future.
My parents' house was the second one they tried.
The owners of the first one wouldn't have them. The curtains in our
house were drawn and we had our conversation with these two refugees
from Delhi's streets in the windowless passage in the middle of the
house. Except that only one of them was really a refugee: the other
boy was there in solidarity, but the streets were safe for him.
The Sikh boy's mother came the next morning in a Fiat driven by a
clean-shaven man, a relative, perhaps, or a friend of the family.
The mother had brought a hand-knitted cap for her son to wear in
place of his turban. They lived in Rajouri Garden in West Delhi. Two
months later, when she returned with her son to meet my parents, she
said that there had been mobs on the way but they had no trouble
because he had been crouched, out of sight, in the leg-space between
the two seats.
In the week that followed, I and many of my friends gathered at
Lajpat Bhavan to do relief work in the name of Nagarik Ekta Manch, a
citizens' group centred in Lajpat Bhavan. This consisted of doing
several different but connected things. We made bundles of blankets,
medicine, utensils, cooking things, matches, basic rations to help
Sikhs in the camps start over again; we went to school buildings
turned into camps in the trans-Yamuna colonies where most of the
killing was done, to write down the testimony of women who had seen
their husbands and sons and fathers burnt to death. We marched
through parts of Delhi to protest the targeted killing of Sikhs,
police inaction and the Congress party's complicity. Apart from one
confrontation with a mob in Ashram, we experienced the unsettling
immunity conferred by our being not-Sikh in a city that had briefly
become an engine for killing Sikhs.
In 1984, I was writing my thesis on communal politics and communal
violence in UP in the decade leading up to Partition. In the
newspapers of the '30s and '40s, the blame for communal riots was
often directed at outsiders. In Trilokpuri, though, we learnt from
widow after widow that the mobs that had killed their menfolk had
been made up of their neighbours, people who had spent evenings
watching television in their homes.
 Deathly stillness enveloped the legendary bustle of the Delhi
railway station as bodies of Sikhs piled up all around.
When I got home every evening from Lajpat Bhavan, I returned to
another world. In Anand Lok, the neighbourhood in which my parents
and I lived, there was a mohalla meeting to discuss security on the
third night of the violence. No one actually said so, but the reason
for the meeting was the rumour that bands of vengeful Sikhs were
about to attack mainly Hindu neighbourhoods. The previous night
someone we knew had woken us up to tell us not to drink water out of
the tap because Sikhs had poisoned the Okhla reservoir. At the
meeting, able-bodied men were assigned guard duties. Someone asked
how, if we sighted a mob, were we to raise an alarm, because making
phone calls would take too long. A middle-aged man in a cravat
suggested that the guard who made the sighting ought to get into his
car and honk out some simple sequence of sounds that we all
recognised; like One, Two, Cha-Cha-Cha.
The pogrom of 1984 brought home to metropolitan middle-class people
like me a truth that had long been understood in provincial towns:
that one of the uses of the Indian state was the organisation of
large-scale civil violence. The general election that followed the
pogrom demonstrated that violence of this sort could be electorally
useful: the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi won its largest majority
ever. It won it on the back of an advertising campaign that used
unsubtly coded messages to encourage Hindus to vote for the
Congress.One advertisement asked people made nervous by their
taxi-drivers (who in many cities in India were largely Sikh) to vote
for strong Congress rule. And they did. No one who was old enough to
think in 1984 will be surprised by Narendra Modi's election
victories after the Gujarat pogrom of 2002.
In India we bank on time and forgetfulness to paper over the great
rents in our history. They help but they can't do the job by
themselves. As I write this, the courts are still struggling with
cases about 1984 lodged 20 and more years ago. South Africa's Truth
and Reconciliation Commission made the point that there can be no
peace without the acknowledgement of guilt and public contrition.
Unpunished pogroms license murderers to order up more of the same.
1984 led to 1992 just as certainly as 1992 cleared the ground for
the killings in Gujarat 10 years later. 1984 and its misbegotten
children taught us a life-defining truth: no country can tend to its
living without accounting for its dead.
9 January 2008
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