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India confronts its bloody
past
By Jyoti Malhotra
NEW DELHI - When is a riot not a riot, but
a massacre, even a pogrom? And who is guilty for
instigating the carnage of November 1984, in which
more than 3,000 Sikhs were killed, some burned
alive in "retribution" for the assassination of
former prime minister Indira Gandhi at the hands
of her Sikh bodyguards?
Since a retired
judge of the Supreme Court, G T Nanavati, deemed
August 8 as the day of judgement for all India,
the nation has been gripped by an exhaustive bout
of soul-searching that has the capacity to
overhaul the shape of the country's politics.
Three days after it all began, Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh told parliament on
Wednesday afternoon that the government would do
"everything within the ambit of the law" to see
that action was taken against those named by the
Nanavati commission. By late evening, Jagdish
Tytler, a minister in charge of overseas affairs
in the Congress Party government, had resigned
after being indicted in the Nanavati report.
It was a dramatic end to the drama of the
previous 72 hours. Tytler's apparent admission of
guilt in having a hand in the mob violence of 1984
in which more than 3,000 Sikhs died also meant
that the 21-year-old nightmare that had haunted
India was finally achieving at least partial
closure.
It remains to be seen whether the
other indicted Congress Party members will follow
Tytler's example and whether the government will
take all these men to court. The prime minister
did not spell it out in parliament, but it finally
seemed as if nearly two generations and nine
commissions of inquiry later, the moment of truth
was upon the country. The Congress Party was in
power at the time of the riots. Previous
investigations, held mostly during Congress Party
rule, made little progress as those under
investigation held senior party positions.
Interestingly, the Congress Party was
helped in arriving at this decision by none other
than the left parties, which provide the
government numerical support in parliament. Until
Tuesday afternoon, the left seemed to have been
persuaded by the Congress that "it would lose
face" if Tytler and other Congress workers were
forced to resign. By the evening it had decided
that the moral burden far outweighed political
compulsion. Soon they were telling the Congress
that it might even be forced to "vote against''
the government if adequate action was not taken
against those allegedly responsible for events in
1984.
Political observers pointed out that
the Congress government under the leadership of
Sonia Gandhi had the perfect opportunity to right
a grave, historical wrong - and in the consequent
political catharsis that followed, reinvent the
party's progressive persona in areas such as
pursuing the economic reform process or reserving
33% of seats in parliament for women.
After all, it was Sonia Gandhi's
mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated
October 31, 1984 by two Sikh bodyguards in her
home. Within hours, Sonia Gandhi's husband Rajiv
Gandhi had inherited the mantle of India's
premiership. And almost immediately, the
"organized carnage" of the Sikh community in Delhi
and other parts of India had begun.
The
massacre then had been fueled by the mass rumor
that Sikhs had distributed sweets on the news of
Indira Gandhi's death. (They had not, though many
had allegedly been enraged by her order a few
months earlier to storm the Golden Temple in
Amritsar, considered to be Sikhism's holiest
shrine.) Newspaper reports from 1984, reprinted in
2005, spoke of the systematic manner in which a
handful of Congress leaders mobilized the mobs and
ordered the ethnic cleansing of the Sikh
community.
The observers also pointed to
the perfect historical irony: What Rajiv Gandhi
couldn't do in the space of the five years he was
prime minister - after he had won more seats for
the Congress Party than ever before in the snap
election called after his mother's assassination -
his Italian-born wife would end up doing. Sonia
Gandhi, helped by her Sikh prime minister, would
for the first time in 21 years attempt to provide
a semblance of justice for the 1984 riot victims.
For the past three days, motley groups of
men, women and children, all of them leftovers
from the massacre of 1984, have marched to
parliament to present themselves to the
parliamentarians and the media. Here were the
children still in their mother's wombs in 1984,
when their fathers had been burned alive by
rampaging Hindu mobs. Young children, told by
their mothers that the reason their fathers never
came home was because they had "gone abroad to
work", had turned into young adults. And then
there were the aging matriarchs and middle-aged
widows, their slow gait burdened with the trauma
of 21 years ago.
Meanwhile, the
opposition, inside and outside parliament,
targeted and subtly taunted the Congress's "Sikh
prime minister" for his "inability" to take action
against the guilty. The longer Manmohan Singh
remained silent, the more his reputation as "a
decent man in India's political cesspool" was at
stake. The gambit worked. By Wednesday evening the
prime minister had risen to assure parliament that
New Delhi would take "every action" to bring the
guilty to justice.
Ironically, today's
crisis in the Congress Party comes in wake of 1992
religious riots in India's financial capital,
Mumbai, as well as in Gujarat in 2003. In all more
than 3,000 Muslims were killed. Observers pointed
out that if the Congress continued to defy public
opinion, as it had in the past 21 years, it would
lose the right to criticize the Bhartiya Janata
Party's role in the Gujarat pogrom.
Moreover, the opposition, having succeeded
in embarrassing the ruling party in the previous
three days, surely would not let parliament
function again. The Congress, knowing full well
that it had never been able to erase the long
shadow cast by the 1984 riots, would be
politically crippled in the coming months. The
government would be badly damaged.
"This
controversy is not about the Congress Party," said
P C Alexander, a former chief bureaucrat to Indira
Gandhi. "This is about democracy and the rule of
law in India. If this government does not book
those guilty of the carnage against innocent
Sikhs, people will have less and less faith in the
country."
In this week that precedes the
58th anniversary celebrations of India's
independence day - an event still known as the
"partition" of the sub-continent on religious
grounds - the Nanavati commission sought to clean
up the lingering stench from the Sikh massacre of
nearly 21 years ago. The good news is that India's
periodic propensity for violence has received a
major setback.
Jyoti Malhotra is
a political analyst based in New Delhi.
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