Aheli Moitra
In 2004, a US based human rights organization, Ensaaf, released a 150-page report titled ‘Twenty Years of Impunity’. The report was on the November 1984 pogroms of Sikhs in India. The word ‘pogrom’ is Russian for devastation, but is used in this context as violent mob attack, generally planned, against ethnic or religious groups. The Sikh pogrom was described by Rajiv Gandhi, the pilot turned politician, as an equal and opposite reaction to the killing of his mother, Indira Gandhi, by her Sikh bodyguard.
28 years since, impunity, or the escape from indictment, for the State continues. Rajiv Gandhi’s line of thought remains with many Indians today—the absurd view that Sikhs were massacred in thousands, and for years hence, for a Prime Minister no one liked. Indira Gandhi’s regime had not taken the Khalistan movement kindly. The tussle between the State and peoples’ autonomy had spilled over leading to counter insurgency and assassination. Consequently, in New Delhi alone, the police stood by the killing of 2,733 Sikhs.
The Commission of Inquiry, headed by Justice Ranganath Mishra, took a stance similar to Junior Gandhi—that the massacre was a “spontaneous and involuntary reaction” by ordinary citizens to Senior Gandhi’s assassination.
Ensaaf’s detailed report traces the patterns and characteristics of the violence against Sikhs in New Delhi, Kanpur and Bokaro. It examines the background of State oppression in Punjab, role of the police during the pogroms, the response of the political leadership (Congress et al), the elections held after the massacre and how justice was stonewalled. The report, prepared from extensive research, was written by a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Jaskaran Kaur.
From 1984-1995, Indian security forces tortured, “disappeared”, killed and illegally cremated more than 10, 000 Punjabi Sikhs in counter-insurgency operations, wrote Kaur in a piece for The Boston Globe in 2005. From Amritsar district alone, 2,097 people had fallen victim to secret and illegal cremations by the police. The man behind unearthing this data, Jaswant Singh Khalra, subsequently disappeared, murdered.
A senior high court judge, while terming her a “naive daughter”, told Kaur that fundamental rights did not exist during an insurgency.
In October 2006, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), following investigation, compensated the next of kin of 1, 051 individuals for wrongful cremations of their loved ones. Another 194 were compensated for admitted custody of the victim by the Punjab police before cremation. However, custody was kept unconnected to the cremations. No criminal responsibility was pinned to perpetrators. It took a Sikh Prime Minister to even acknowledge the crime. In August 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apologized for the Sikh massacre but, yet again, refused to accept State responsibility.
Ensaaf’s report went on to attempt, through a detailed argument, to define the acts of November 1984 as genocide. It compares and contrasts the crimes of November 1984 with Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. But the international law of genocide is itself ridden with holes. India continues to stay away from the International Criminal Court, and 28 years since November 1984, justice continues to evade.
