NEW DELHI: The bloodstains have disappeared but the memories have not of deadly anti-Sikh riots that shook India two decades ago after the assassination of Congress party premier Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.
Now a new inquiry into the carnage has stirred fresh controversy with Sikhs, the opposition and the media demanding that the Congress government led by India’s first Sikh premier, Manmohan Singh, act against its perpetrators.
“The riots are a blot on independent India’s history,” said former Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party premier Atal Behari Vajpayee outside parliament, where proceedings were halted on Tuesday by opposition protests.
“The government should take action to punish the guilty.”
The report by retired judge G. T. Nanavati, tabled in parliament this week, linked some Congress party members to the 1984 riots in which nearly 3,000 died. It also said a junior minister, Jagdish Tytler, may have incited rioters.
But it cleared the Congress party, which was in power at the time, of any blame, leading to cries of ‘whitewash’ from critics.
“The fact is it was a very cynical, diabolic act perpetrated by the state,” Rahul Bedi, a Sikh who covered the riots as a young reporter, told AFP.
Bedi, now a journalist for Jane’s Defence Weekly , recalled the riots as ‘a numbing experience — everything just fell apart, except the rule of the mob.”
The killings began hours after Gandhi’s 1984 assassination and continued in New Delhi for more than three days until authorities finally intervened.
Police first turned a blind eye as roving gangs wielding iron rods and sticks invaded homes, dragging out Sikh families, killing men and boys, witnesses said. Some victims were set ablaze, others bludgeoned to death.
“Those of us who lived through this holocaust saw with our own eyes gangs of thugs being brought in trucks and let loose to burn gurudwaras (temples), Sikh-owned taxis and shops, and to dowse hapless men with kerosene,” India’s best-known Sikh author, Khushwant Singh, recalled after the event.
“Armed police watched the spectacle without firing a shot,” he said.
The Sikhs’ beards and turbans made them easy targets in the violence that raged mainly through New Delhi but also other parts of India. Many cut their hair to escape. Some were hidden by their non-Sikh neighbours.
Gandhi’s assassination came in revenge against her sending the army to evict Sikh separatists from Sikhism’s holiest site, the Golden Temple. The government says 2,733 people were slain in reprisal for her killing, but Sikhs say the toll was at least 4,000.
One part of the capital New Delhi has since been known as ‘Widows Colony’, where wives of Sikh men who died live in poverty. Many of their children grew up angry and alienated.
“Who’ll compensate us for the childhood we lost?” school dropout Kishore Singh, 21, now a vegetable seller, told a newspaper.
“We want justice,” protesting widows shouted on Tuesday, demanding that those responsible ‘should be hanged’.
The government refuses to take action against Tytler, who has denied involvement, saying it cannot act on a probability. But it says it will see if steps can be taken against a few other Congress leaders named in the report.
India’s media said it was vital to punish the guilty.
“The fact that not one of those who masterminded or spearheaded this carnage has had to face punishment will remain an affront to the nation; an unfinished business that mocks its democratic pretensions,” said the Indian Express .
The government’s credibility ‘is on test’, the newspaper said. “Will it seek to brazenly protect its own, or will it choose to serve the ends of justice?”
Still, commentators were sceptical the Hindu nationalist BJP would push its calls for action too far.
They said it would be fearful of the spotlight being turned on them over the 2002 Gujarat state riots, in which it was accused of turning a blind eye to the killings of about 2,000 people, mainly Muslims.—AFP
