Gurcharan Singh Babbar, the All India Sikh Conference (AISC) President, has been fighting an almost lone battle for justice for the victims of the Sikh carnage in November 1984. Five thousand Sikhs, mostly men, were killed—burnt alive, bludgeoned and lynched– by state-sponsored mobs in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination by two Sikh security guards on October 31, 1984. Thousands of women were raped and scores of thousands of Sikhs were mentally and physically injured.
On Monday, November 1, 2021, the 38th anniversary of the genocide, Babbar stood in Delhi’s Gurudwara Rakab Ganj along with a group of Sikhs to protest against the justice denied to the victims’ families. As the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) soldiers and Delhi Police cops looked on, the protestors burnt the copies of the many and useless commissions of enquiry into the 1984 carnage of Sikhs. Babbar and three others were later escorted by the Delhi police to the prime minister’s office (PMO) where they submitted a memorandum, appealing for justice.
This was the 1997th demonstration held by Babbar’s AISC in 37 years since the carnage. Babbar does not see any light at the end of the tunnel and yet he continues what has looked like a losing battle from the start. To begin with, the genocide was projected as spontaneous and reprisal killings. The subsequent commissions of enquiry and hundreds of eye witness accounts have, however, proved that it was organised by the ministers and parliamentarians of the Indian National Congress (INC)-led central government. The mobs were organised and the police simply looked the other way for five days and nights before the army was called to control the mobs. By then, the police in Delhi, where the bloodthirsty mobs expended the maximum savagery, had completed the job of a cover up.
Instead of filing first information reports, taking pictures of the dead, conducting post-mortems, and identifying and catching the killers, the police simply piled the bodies of Sikhs, many of them charred and half eaten by dogs, in trucks, took them to the outskirts of south Delhi, poured kerosene and petrol on them and burnt them to ashes. Legally, it would be hard to prove most of the killings, and the killed would be described as “missing persons”.
It is impossible for anyone who saw those killings to wipe out their memory. To know that not a single police official was brought to book, that the INC leaders, including alleged plotters Kamal Nath and Jagdish Tytler, continue to hold important party positions and the hundreds of killers, who participated in the massacre, are still roaming free in the country, is to know that barbarism continues to have official sanction. I myself saw many killings and I remember the picture taken by the photographer of the magazine I worked for: a mother, holding the scalp of her son by the tuft of hair in one hand and a picture of the son in the other, gone mad with grief, asking the crowd if they had seen him. And I remember the pictures of kerosene-soaked, flaming tyres around the necks of Sikh men as the crowds celebrated. Each sight of the killings was worse than the other.
Many of the top police officers who presided over the killings are dead and scores of others have retired as honourable state servants, enjoying the full benefits of retirement. Most of the thousands of widows of the Sikh men killed by the mobs are dead. The rape victims, too ashamed to come forward then (late Gen. J. S. Arora told me in an interview in 1989), would carry the trauma in their ashes. The very young children of the victims have been scarred for life.
In 1994, I met Harbans Kaur, 19, in a colony where the widows of the 1984 victims had been settled under an official relief and rehabilitation scheme. Hiding behind a wall, she had seen the killing of her father in front of her nine-year-old eyes. I asked her if she knew the political background to the story of the carnage that swallowed her 29-year-old father. “I only remember someone saying our prime minister had been killed and our family feeling sad about it.” How her thoughts evolved and how her world view changed through the prism of personal pain and trauma can be gauged from this: she told me that a couple of years after the assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, she saw a picture of Priyanka Gandhi fighting her tears and looking pained at Veer Sthal, the Samadhi of her father, Rajiv Gandhi. “That day, I felt relief as at last I saw that she was going through the same pain, and told myself, ‘at least, now, she would know what it means to lose a father’.”
This is just one of the scores of stories of unaddressed pain and trauma I have heard from the families (many of the young became mental patients and took to drugs to treat their traumas), and witnesses of the 1984 carnage. Like many other journalists who witnessed those dark days in India’s recent political history, I have no choice but to continue highlighting the need for justice through my writing. This is the only tool I have. Babbar feels the same. Results or no results, protest demonstrations are the only way he can carry on the struggle for justice. He believes that “the memory of the 1984 genocide must be kept alive for the political education of the new generation of Sikhs and Indians, who do not even know what happened.” Instinctively, he is echoing the profound thought that those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.
Over the last few years, Babbar has shifted the focus from the “political masterminds of the organised crimes to the police officials and executors.” He does not want politicians to play ball over this issue because he feels that is exactly what they have been doing. Not that he does not know the value of bringing to justice the political organisers of the genocide: according to him, the 27 affidavits he filed before the Justice Jain Committee against the plotters have nearly all been picked up by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and whatever legal action has been taken–against Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, for instance, it is on the basis of these affidavits.
In the absence of FIRs or manipulated police reports (under pressure from the various commissions of enquiry), his affidavits are the only legal evidence of the crimes. Having started his documentation on the fifth day of the massacre, he has fought a ceaseless paperwork battle till date. The book (1984–State Sponsored Sikh Carnage) he wrote in 1996-97 and distributed free, lately, its digital copies; the campaigns he has been running in The Sikh Times, the Delhi newspaper of which he is the proprietor-editor, and the talks he has been giving at social and political forums, all indicate a dogged and constructive approach to the cause of justice.
Predictably, he has invited suspicion from the Congress Party of working on a hidden political agenda and praise from its opponents for fixing the party, but he neither gets nervous nor swayed by it. He is fighting for truth, which, he says, “is never easy.” Babbar has an arsenal of facts, affidavits and petitions that he gave in courts, and memorandums he submitted to political leaders and the ruling establishment. He courted arrest many times and having spent years in roadside protest demonstrations, including hunger strikes at Delhi’s Boat Club and Jantar Mantar, he says, he knows the value of “satyagrah”. He was even targeted by the Delhi police in 1989, and put on the “Wanted” list, but with the entire opposition of the day backing him (see image), the police had to back off. Barring a couple of them, the political leaders who saw and supported Babbar’s work, are dead.
The almost fruitless struggle and the long passage of time have not, however, dented Babbar’s spirit and energy for the campaign. With the social media as his most effective tool, he has been successful in keeping alive an issue he believes “involves the future of Sikhs as a community and that of India as a democracy, which is first and foremost about the rule of law.” Even now, Babbar says, there is time to bring to book the police officials responsible for the crimes of omission and commission in the Sikh carnage, and along with them, the hired killers known to the police. “Sometimes”, he adds philosophically, “even justice delayed is justice.”
Having received a massive response to his social media campaigns over the November 1984 issue, Babbar is convinced that it gives hope to the Sikh community just to know that the tragedy has not been forgotten and that their stories are being shared with the new generation.
Discussion about this post