Deccan Herald, India
April 6 2008
Waking the dead
Aditi Bhaduri
An anguished book, but the author has fallen into the very trap she
cautions against, essentialising and stereotyping.
`The whole carnage was orchestrated by these people in power. When
the president and prime minister are the masterminds behind the
entire carnage, who is going to come to your aid? Why would the
police stop the criminals? They were told to supervise the murders,
the rioting, the looting…
`The government won’t do a damn thing but my curse will finish all
these people’s lives. Is the Gandhi family prospering right now? If
they want to give us justice, ok. If not, my Waheguru is there. Here
is 1.25 lakhs, here take this money and shut up – that is what they
say. What am I to do with this money; set it alight?’
Kuldeep Kaur’s cry reaches us from the abyss of the 1984 Sikh pogrom
in the capital which claimed the life of at least 3,000 Sikhs.
Twenty-four years later, the families of these Sikhs still await
justice. Justice, which continues to elude women like Kuldeep, women
who were brutalised and traumatised, widowed, raped, orphaned in
November 1984. At a time when voices from distant lands are coming
back to haunt the nation because `there are ghosts that don’t want to
be laid to rest’, this book is not just timely, it is prophetic.
Renowned Israeli Leftist Yossi Sarid had said that `… an orphaned
genocide is the father of the next genocide’. He was referring to the
Armenian genocide, which, allowed to fade into history with impunity,
is considered to have engendered the Jewish Holocaust. Grewal’s book
is a grim reminder that denial of justice to the Sikhs for their
trauma in 1984 has spawned the communal violence that followed later
in other parts of the country, violence where the state is clearly
implicated.
The book is a rivetting, terrifying account of the Punjab horror of
the 70s and 80s which culminated in the death of Indira Gandhi by her
Sikh bodyguards and the massacre of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi in 1984.
Domino effect
Grewal comprehensively recounts how what began as an innocuous but
shoddily drafted resolution demanding greater autonomy for Punjab and
equity for Punjabis in general and Sikhs in particular soon
boomeranged into a terrifying nightmare not just for Punjab but for
the entire nation.
Personal ambitions, abortion of justice, suspension of Constitutional
rights, political power and myopia, deliberate use of religion and
communal politics, all insidiously merged to become the `Punjab
crisis’. It was, as the author writes, all `about jockeying for
political power, controlling economic power, and aggrandising
personal power’.
But revisiting the Punjab crisis is not the main merit of this book,
in which gaps remain. Tavleen Singh, a Sikh herself and no admirer of
the Congress, has in her columns recorded that Sikh youth crossed
over the border into Pakistan to undergo arms training, in camps
established for this purpose, to fight the Indian state for the
creation of Khalistan. Grewal, strangely, misses out on this aspect
of the Punjab problem even as she goes into details on Congress and
Akali politics and mentions the support rendered to the `Khalistan’
movement by diasporic Sikhs.
There seems to be an attempt to construct historical fissures and
cleavages between communities, constructs which serves no community’s
cause. While Sikhs are definitely a community distinct from Hindus,
Sikhism has much in common with Hinduism and in 1947 the Sikhs did
throw in their lot with Hindu dominated India.
Rather, the book is a valuable testimony to the fact that 23 years
and nine commissions later, the victims of 1984 are still awaiting
justice. It records the continued trauma of members of the Sikh
community because `The pathos is first in the act of the violence and
then in living with the consequences of violence.’
The year 1984 left behind `3000 brutal murders, orphaned 4000
children, widowed thousands of women, displaced 50,000 people’ – all
Sikhs. Grewal amplifies the experiences of these Sikhs and the
dangers inherent in the continued denial of justice to those whose
lives had been fractured by the violence of 1984. (The Prime
Minister’s apology is a little too late). For these `chaurasiyas’ –
the nomenclature for these victim-survivors of 1984 – the `pain
refuses to leave because justice continues to elude them.’
The account is a gendered one, because the large-scale violence, `a
consequence of strategic planning’ saw the `focussed selection of
Sikh males, regardless of age.’ Left behind were the Sikh women, for
some of whom `the violence was done twice over, first to their body
through rape, and then the loss of male family members.’ Most of them
have been herded into Tilak Vihar (the widows’ colony) in the
outskirts of Delhi. The author privileges them because, `it is these
women who have borne most deeply the wounds of November 1984.’
And then there are the orphans. Left to themselves – their fathers
dead and their mothers having to take up work outside the home to
earn a living – focus-less, loafing, many took to drugs while still
others took to crime. Some struggled through shattered childhoods to
find jobs to live with dignity. It is remarkable then that these
children have not grown up to become militants and harbour no
feelings of revenge. Any visitor to Punjab today finds it difficult
to believe that this is the same place where such violence and terror
had reigned.
Yet Betrayed by the State is an angry and anguished book. Jyoti
Grewal seems to be falling into that very trap that she is cautioning
others against – essentialising and stereotyping – this time the Hindu
majority. She does warn against generalising though as many voices
from the majority community were raised and are still raised against
the Sikh pogrom of 1984 – some of which the book records.
Neither the Congress Party ruling then nor the mobs that unleashed
the violence speak for all Hindus. And the 1984 pogrom was followed
by a reign of terror in the Punjab let loose by those demanding
Khalistan, a terror amply reciprocated by the Punjab police.
The murders of busloads of Hindus, the blowing up of the
transatlantic aeroplane deserve more than one line dismissals. Pain
cannot and should not be hierarchized. This perhaps is the central
message of the book with all its inclusions and omissions; as `The
stench of the diseased body politic refuses to go away…’ A long
lost cry of those betrayed, Betrayed By The State is a jolt to the
collective conscience of the nation.
Betrayed By The State: The Anti-Sikh Pogrom of 1984
By Jyoti Grewal
Penguin Books India – 2007
Pp. 223
Rs. 275/-
s2008040561216.asp