INDIA: Ghosts of 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogrom Haunt Congress Party

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 11 2005 (IPS) - Two decades after mobs, infuriated by the Oct.31, 1984 assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, massacred more than 4,000 members of the religious sect, India’s Congress party continues to pay a price for the pogrom.

Late Wednesday, Jagdish Tytler was compelled to resign as union minister for overseas Indian affairs after a public uproar over the results of an inquiry commission. The findings named him as one of several Congress leaders who goaded the mobs to attack Sikh men easily distinguished by their turbans and unshorn beards.

The massacre worsened relations between the Congress party and the powerful Sikh community, which dominates western Punjab state, and the first hint of reconciliation came only with the selection of Manmohan Singh, a follower of the Sikh faith, as prime minister in May 2004 following a Congress victory.

In an act of sacrifice as well as political sagacity, Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress party and daughter-in-law to Indira Gandhi, stepped aside from the top job to make way for Singh, a self-effacing, former professor of economics who earned his doctorate from Britain’s Oxford University.

The elder Gandhi’s assassination was carried out in revenge for the army raid that the ‘Iron Lady’ ordered on the Sikh ‘holy of holies,’ the Golden Temple, in the city of Amritsar, in Punjab, to clear it of heavily-armed Sikh militants who had taken over the shrine and converted it into a fortress.

Soon after the assassination, Sikh homes and businesses in the national capital and other cities were in flames until Gandhi’ son and successor Rajiv Gandhi (and husband of the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi) called in the army – several days too late.

Immediately after Singh was sworn in, his attention was drawn to the plight of Sikh women who were widowed in the riots or lost their grown sons in the pogrom which largely spared women.

But many of the widows, who gathered at the lawns of the ancient Jantar Mantar, 17th century observatory in the heart of the capital, on Wednesday, swathed in white, said they wished they had been killed too rather than live a life bereft of their men and in destitution.

‘’I wish we had all died in 1984. The government made empty promises of rehabilitation but most of us got nothing and live in penury,” said Manjit Kaur, one of a group of 500 widows camping at the Jantar Mantar lawns and refusing to leave until ‘’we see justice finally done.”

Most the widows were unimpressed by the findings of the report drawn up by the Nanavati Commission, named for a retired judge G.T. Nanavati who headed it. Navanti was assigned this task in 2000 by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government, which included the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), Sikh religious party.

While the BJP lost elections to the Congress party at the centre, the SAD lost out to a local unit of the Congress party under the present chief minister, Amarinder Singh, a powerful political leader and scion of a Sikh royal family which once ruled large parts of the Punjab region.

On Wednesday, Singh pledged in parliament, following cries within the house by the BJP as well as the communist allies of the Congress party, that the commission’s findings would be honoured and that legal action would be initiated against those named by it for instigating the pogrom.

‘’Our government will consult the law ministry to bring the guilty to book to the maximum possible extent. This is a solemn promise and a solemn commitment,” Singh pledged.

But Singh’s promise came not only as a result of the outcry in parliament – where members demanded a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ modelled after the one in South Africa to deal with the apartheid period – but also after several hard-hitting editorials in leading newspapers.

‘’In a democracy if mob-violence of the kind that was perpetrated on the capital’s Sikh community in 1984 is ever allowed to be glossed over, even once, its memory is routinised – that is the biggest danger. It would be sad travesty if a government that professes a special commitment to India’s pluralism and a more human face to its policies should contribute to the undermining of faith in both secularism and justice,” said an editorial in the influential Indian Express daily on Wednesday.

The reference was to the far worse pogrom unleashed against the minority Muslim community by the Hindu fundamentalist BJP government in Gujarat in 2002, the public horror at which resulted in the BJP’s rout in the 2004 national elections, as admitted by its own leadership.

The Sikh separatist movement petered out in the early 1990s after a Congress government, under the late prime minister Narasimha Rao, authorised a high-ranking Sikh police officer, K.P.S. Gill, to launch a ruthless policy to seek and eliminate the top leadership.

Gill’s ‘bullet-for-bullet’ policy ensured Sikh resentment against the Congress party and resulted in the forging of an unlikely alliance between the pro-Hindu BJP and the Sikh SAD, which contributed greatly to keeping the Congress party out of national power between 1996 and 2004.

But the appointment as prime minister of Manmohan Singh, from a family settled in Amritsar after migrating from what is now Pakistan in 1945, deflated the anti-Congress campaign run by the SAD party which can count on funding from wealthy overseas Sikhs settled in Britain, the United States and Canada.