India’s Congress Party Still Denies Responsibility for 1984 Massacre of Sikhs
Editor’s Note: The following column by Hartosh Singh Bal originally appeared on NYTimes Blogs in November 2012. Please see bottom for complete source information.
NEW DELHI (May 11, 2013)–The 28th anniversary of the massacre of 3,000 Sikh men in New Delhi in retaliation for the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards passed largely in silence again. None of the major political figures from the Congress Party who are said to have been involved in the killings has been convicted, and no one in the administration has been held accountable.
In 2005, while reporting for the newsweekly Tehelka, I met the women of Block 32, in Trilokpuri, one of areas of
She added: “The violence began only when H.K.L. Bhagat came to the area. He told the mob not to spare a single male. The Sikhs, he said, were like serpents. If you spare the boys, they will grow up to kill you. Days later he came to the relief camp at Shahdara to distribute blankets. We chased him out.” Back then, H.K.L. Bhagat was a member of Parliament for the Congress Party from
After eight commissions were wound up before drawing any conclusions or failed to consider who was responsible for the riots, in 2000 a non-Congress government set up the Nanavati Commission to probe the killings. In a 2004 report, it described having found “credible material” against “Congress leaders and workers” in
Members of the Sikh community, and family members of victims of the 1984 riots, protested on Oct. 31 demanding jail sentences for those responsible. Courtesy: European Pressphoto Agency Members of the Sikh community, and family members of victims of the 1984 riots, protested on Oct. 31 demanding jail sentences for those responsible.
The report incriminated scores of ordinary party employees, as well as three men who were senior Congress leaders from
Yet the perpetrators rose politically even after their roles in the killings were widely reported in the media. Bhagat became a cabinet minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government, which was in power during the killings and re-elected months later. Tytler became minister of civil aviation in the same government; today, he is in charge of the Congress Party in the state of Orissa. And Kumar became a member of Parliament in 2004.
And though after the Nanavati Commission report old cases were revived and new ones brought against Tytler and Kumar — Bhagat died in 2005 — they have yielded no resolution. The cases against Tytler were closed after the investigating agency stated that the witnesses were either dead or unwilling to testify or that their testimony would be unreliable so many years after the riots. The most that has come out of any legal proceeding to date is a statement by the prosecutor in the case against Kumar for inciting a mob to murder.
The prosecutor told the court that “the police acted in a pre-planned manner, and every policeman was keeping his eyes closed” during the 1984 riots. “Whatever action was taken by the police was taken against the people who helped the Sikhs. Police did not take action against the main culprits.” Considering that in
Congress Party bigwigs have occasionally expressed remorse for the killings. In 1999, Sonia Gandhi, the head of the Congress Party, said after a visit to the Sikh monument of Harmandir Sahib in
But neither acknowledgment came anywhere close to recognizing the role that the Congress Party’s faithful played in the massacre. Congress often invokes the violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 to attack the main opposition party, the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, and the chief minister of
That the Congress could get away without noting the massacre on its 28th anniversary this year is a reminder that the pretense of apology by the guilty may be the most effective way of denying justice to the victims.
Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor of Open Magazine and co-author of “A Certain Ambiguity.’’