Twenty Second Anniversary of India's state sponsored Sikh pogroms
Why have the guilty, like Jagdish Tytler and others, who are well known, not been punished by the ‘Sikh’ Prime minister of India?
Diaspora Sikhs are thinking about organizing a posthumous public trial abroad of that ‘mass murderer’ Rajiv Gandhi
Last week BJP leader Jaswant Singh was hooted and ridiculed by Sikh & Muslim students at the Berkley campus of University of California
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, November 01, 2006 - This week, twenty two years ago, (October 31 to November 03, 1984) thousands of innocent Sikh men, women and children, were murdered by Police-led thugs of the ruling Congress party who rampaged through Sikh localities of major Indian cities (Delhi, Calcutta, Madras and Lucknow, Cownpore, Patna, Bokaro, Jabalpur and many other smaller towns) raping, burning and killing Sikhs.The peaceful Sikh community under attack by Hindu mobs at that time, did not even know that they were being attacked by the police-led Hindu mobs because two brave Sikhs bodyguards of the PM’s detail, had decided, on their own, to take revenge on the person responsible for the June 1984 Indian army attack on the Sikh holiest of holies the Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, and 37 other shrines in which military operation thousands of Sikh pilgrims were murdered. The two Sikh martyrs had figured out that the evil personality behind the unwarranted Army attack was none other than the then the Prime minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi, of the Nehru dynasty, who was grooming her second dim-witted son, Rajiv Gandhi, 40, a pilot, to inherit the Prime minister’s ‘throne’ after having lost her other son, and heir apparent, Sanjay Gandhi in a 1981 air crash death. Rajiv Gandhi, who was in Orrisa, Eastern India, when his mother was dispatched to kingdom come by her bodyguards, on Octoober 31, 1984, rushed by air to Delhi on the same day. Incidentally, Rajiv Gandhi’s first act, on reaching New Delhi, was to taunt the Congress party leaders and police officials, who came to the airport to receive him, was to tell them to go and ‘teach the Sikhs a lesson’. In a matter of hours a back office intrigue was launched, (the like of which has no precedent) when senior bureaucrats nominated unread Rajiv Gandhi, 40, as the new Prime minister of India. The action of these influential officials was ‘rubber stamped’ by a weak, corrupt and dishonest President of India, a Sikh, Gyani Zal Singh.
The Indian parliament was not even consulted for the making of the new Prime minister of India. Dynastic Democracy Indian style in which all the Prime ministers – or king-makers – of the dynasty, from Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi to Sonia Gandhi to Rahul Gandhi the current ‘Young Pretender’, are half literate as they have never graduated from a school. Indra Ganshi attended prominent Indian, European and British schools like Santiniketan and Oxford, but her weak academic performance prevented her from obtaining a degree from any. Her son Rajiv attended college at the Imperial College London and Cambridge University, but he did not receive a degree. His son Rahul Gandhi, the Young Pretender to the Indian ‘Prime minister’s throne’, attended St. Columba's School in New Delhi and then The Doon School, his father's alma mater which he attended 1981-83 before being home-schooled for security reasons. Rahul’s admission to St. Stephen's College was controversial as he was believed to have been admitted on the basis of his abilities as a competitive pistol shooter, which were disputed. It is reported that Harvard alumni records list him as attending between 1990 and 1993 but not as completing a degree just like his father and and grand mother. It seems India is destined to be ruled by school dropouts of the phony “Gandhi” dynasty which has no relationship with India’s founding father, Gandhi.
Let it be on record that the two Sikh bodyguards by dispatching an errant ruler, like Indira Gandhi, to Kingdom come were following a long standing South Asian tradition. It was nothing new to South Asian politics. Many South Asian rulers have been killed when they became too corrupt or too extravagant or too weak. Modern India also has the unique distinction of murdering its own founding father, Mr. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, (1869-1948) on 30 January 1948, in New Delhi. Rajiv Gandhi himself was later killed by the Hindu Tamils in May 1991 in a town near Chennai – no state-supervised pogrom was launched against the Tamils as a result a la the Sikhs. A number of Prime ministers of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma and Sri Lanka have also been killed in the second part of the twentieth century.
Lest we forget the ‘hell’ the Sikh community went through, all over India, in November of 1984 an excellent, very moving and spine-chilling eye witness audio account of that four-days-long November 1984 state-sponsored pogrom, covering the bloody happenings in India's capital city Delhi, in which thousands of Sikhs were murdered by Congress-led Hindu mobs rampaging under Police supervision, (narrated by a Punjabi writer, Ms. Ajeet Kaur, recorded under the auspices of the South Asia Literature programme of the U.S. Library of Congress, headlined 'November 1984',) can be heard by clicking at the following link: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/mbrs/master/salrp/07202.mp3 We urge all our readers to find the time to hear this audio recording and refresh the memory. A record of what happened to the Sikh community on those brutal days of November 1984, is also recorded for ever on the website, “Carnage 84 – massacre of 4, 000 Sikhs in Delhi”. Read the introduction to the very moving narrative by clicking at: www.carnage84.com/homepage/mainpage.htm and www.carnage84.com/intro/intro.htm
As far as the Sikhs are concerned the matter has not been forgotten. We always remember our martyrs. Many wise men and women among the 3 million strong diaspora Sikhs, who are free and prosperous, are thinking about organizing a posthumous public trial abroad of that ‘mass murderer’, Rajiv Gandhi so that the next generation is educated about the crimes of the evil Nehru dynasty which rules India. This will teach our youth to look at Rajiv Gandhi through the proper lense as a mass murderer, whose Italian wife is currently strutting around as a King-maker in India – she is the one who appointed Mr. Manmohan Singh, (who has never been elected to any public office) as Prime minister of India. Mass-murderer Rajiv Gandhi’s unread effeminate son, Rahul Gandhi, 36, a bachelor, is slowing making moves to get closer to the Indian Prime minister’s ‘throne’. Like his father, Rajiv Gandhi, his mother Sonia Gandhi, his grandmother Mrs. Indra Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi has never graduated from any school and might end up ruling India. (http://in.rediff.com/election/2004/mar/23espec1.htm) The new Sikh generation needs to be educated about this Nehru dynasty, and reminded about what happened to the Sikhs in June and November 1984 and who ordered the massacres. We Sikhs must always remember our prayer “Raj Karayga Khalsa” which calls for an independent, democratic, buffer state of Khalistan located between warring India and Pakistan which will act as a bridge of peace and commerce.
There is movement in the right direction in the Sikh diaspora. Last week a speech by the former Indian External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh was interrupted by Sikh and Muslim students at the University of California, Berkeley. The students led by Sikhs stormed the International House where Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Major Jaswant Singh, a former foreign and finance minister in the Neo-Nazi BJP coalition government, was speaking. The situation turned tense when Sikh students captured the stage by surrounding him amid shouts of, “you cannot apologize for genocide,” referring to the anti-Muslim state supervised Gujerat pogrom of 2002, and the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, in which thousands of innocents were murdered. Organizers of the Berkeley lecture tried to disperse the protesters, which included community members as well as students, but failed. Sikh activists managed to ‘capture’ the stage and stalled the event for over half-an-hour during which the protestors made speeches and distributed pamphlets. The report of Jaswant Singh’s humiliation was covered by numerous newspapers in the U.S. and India like Deccan Chronicle of October 28, 2006 which can be read by clicking at: http://www.deccan.com/home/homedetails.asp#Students%20heckle%20Jaswant.
For a widely read local California news paper, The Daily Californian, reporter Jane Shin covered the October 27 event, at the Berkley university, and penned a story, along with a photograph, with a headline, “Indian Politician's Speech Disrupted by Protesters,” which report can be read by clicking at: http://dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=22028 The Chennai-based Hindu newspaper has also reported the Berkley University incident which can be read at: www.thehindu.com/2006/10/29/stories/2006102901080900.htm According to Aziz Haniffa of rediff.com, “Former External Affairs Minister in the erstwhile Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government Jaswant Singh told rediff.com on November 2, 2006 that the heckling that preceded his speech at the University of California at Berkeley was not so much about the 2002 Gujarat riots but about support for Khalistan. Singh said, ‘It was not so much about Gujarat . In fact, it had nothing to do with Gujarat . It was a handful of... they were really shouting slogans for Khalistan. They wanted a Khalistan, but I don't know who was responsible for it,’ he added.”
We salute the young Sikh patriots for their patriotism, organizing ability and firm stand against a Neo-Nazi politician like Jaswant Singh. We repeat below, in full, the statement read, on behalf of UC Berkeley students and Sikh activists at that protest meeting, by Sirdar Prabhsharandeep Singh:-
Deconstructing “Indian-ness”
“Today we are here to confront a modern nation state, that is India. Struggling to incorporate its traditional identity into its new corpus, the modern Indian-ness (i.e. Hindutva) has initiated a process of self-denial that has had appalling results for the others in the region, whose denial was one of the major motivating factors in order to unite Hindutva as a reactive force. Today we are faced with this colonialist construction as an ultimate reality which claims to have every right to assimilate the other religious, cultural, and linguistic identities as mere sects within “broader framework of Hindu-ism.”
Although the colonial framework has worked as a major blessing in the construction of nationalist Hindu-ism, this is certainly not a point of departure for such aspirations. We have memories of the dialogue between Buddhist monks and the Adi Shankra, similar to the dialogue during Western colonial rule(s), during which the power factor was functional in determining the dynamics of dialogue. The massacres of the Buddhist monks in the hands of the dialogue-friendly Shankra and his followers are no different than the orientalist chauvinism, inherited blindly by its modern Hindu nationalist counterparts.
The British colonial rulers came to the South Asian subcontinent with their claims, grounded in the Enlightenment discourse, of being equipped with the ideal modernist approach as it was rooted in a certain type of rationale. The Indian nationalist, who had just acquired a new term (i.e. Hindu-ism) to define their “religion” in terms of Western monotheism, started to think that they had a legitimate ground to assert as the only religion in the subcontinent and to deny any claims of the minority communities belonging to different religious, cultural, and linguistic groups. Mere appropriation of a variety of philosophic, literary, mythical traditions in terms of Western Enlightenment provided them with every authority to turn the different peoples into subaltern “subjects”.