Remembering the November 1984 holocaust of the Sikh minority in India in which state-supervised bloody exercise over ten thousand innocent Sikh men, women and children were murdered
A tutorial for the post 1984 young Sikh generation
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, October 31, 2007 - The world's twenty five million Sikhs (of whom three million live FREE all over the world in the Sikh diaspora) will today grind their teeth, shed a tear and whisper a silent prayer on the 23rd anniversary of the 1984 country-wide mass killings of over ten thousand innocent Sikh men, women and children whose lives were extinguished in a state-supervised pogrom, in the world's largest demoNcracy - INDIA. A bloody massacre sanctioned (with a wink and a nod) by none other then the then Prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, now diseased, (the late husband of India's current Italian 'king-maker', Mrs Sonia Maino Gandhi and father of the high school dropout young pretender, Rahul Gandhi) who was bent on taking revenge on the small innocent Sikh minority for the assassination, on 31 October 1984, of his mother, the evil incarnate, Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi.For four days and nights (31 October to 3 November 1984) the killing, pillaging and arson against the innocent Sikh minority continued in Delhi (and other towns in India) without the police, the civil administration, the Army and the Union & State governments lifting a finger in admonishment. Innocent Sikh women were gang-raped while their terrified families pleaded for mercy, little or none of which was shown by the rampaging Congress party-led armed Hindu mobs. In one of the numerous such incidents, a woman was gang-raped in front of her 17-year-old son; before leaving, the Hindu marauders torched the boy. The Congress party, was in power in Delhi at that point in time. Its’ senior leaders (like Sajjan Kumar, Jagdish Tytler and H. K. L. Bhagat et al.,) led the Hindu mobs, mustered by the cooperative Police, while the prime minister, his home (police) minister P. V. Naraisimha Rao, indeed the entire council of ministers, twiddled their thumbs in British-built palaces in New Delhi standing on stolen Sikh Gurdwara lands, doing nothing. Obviously, these minions wanted to please the newly appointed Prime Minister, the revengeful Rajiv Gandhi.
By the morning of 1 November 1984, organized Hindu mobs, shouting Congress party slogans, had started running amok in South, East and West Delhi. They were armed with shot guns, iron rods and carried old tires and jerry cans filled with kerosene and petrol. Hindu owners of gas stations and kerosene stores, beneficiaries of Congress largesse, had provided petrol and kerosene free of cost to the rampaging Congress party thugs. Some of these thugs went around on scooters and motorcycles, marking Sikh houses and business establishments with chalk for easy identification. They had been provided with electoral rolls by the ruling Congress party to make the task easier. By late afternoon that day, hundreds of taxis, trucks, shops and homes, owned by Sikhs, had been looted and set ablaze. By early evening, the killing, loot and rape began in right earnest. The worst butchery took place in Block 32 of Trilokpuri, a resettlement colony in East Delhi. Scores of Sikh families were killed over November 1 and 2: most of them were dispatched by putting burning tires around theirs necks. Even as stray dogs gorged on rotting entrails of murdered Sikhs, gutters were clogged with charred corpses and wailing women, clutching children too frightened to cry, fled baying Hindu mobs armed with shot guns, knives, iron rods, staves and gallons of kerosene. To prevent the beleaguered Sikhs from taking refuge in their gurdwaras, most of Delhi's 450 gurdwaras were sacked in the early hours of the violence. The expedient means of setting houses ablaze was used to get at Sikh families who had taken refuge on the roofs of their homes. Entire Sikh families were thus roasted alive.
Meanwhile, state-owned All India Radio and Doordarshan kept on broadcasting blood-curdling slogans of “Khoon ka badla khoon se len`gay” (we shall avenge blood with blood) raised by Congress party workers seeking revenge from innocents over the killing of Prime Minister India Gandhi by two of her bodyguards who happened to be Sikhs. The killings continued with the active abetment and open encouragement of the police and civil administrators. On November 1, some Hindu/Muslim/Sikh residents of Lajpat Nagar took out a peace march to thwart the violence. The police stopped the march because the participants did not have 'official permission.' In many places, police asked Sikhs to hand over their kirpans, (a sword carried by Sikhs as a religious symbol) took them away forcibly if the Sikhs refused, before armed Hindu mobs descended upon them. Lest people forget the state-sponsored ‘hell’ India’s Sikh minority went through, all over India, during the four ‘dark’ days of November 1984, an excellent, very moving and spine-chilling eye witness audio account of that November 1984 state-supervised pogrom, covering the bloody happenings in India's capital city Delhi, is readily available in an eye witness audio account narrated by a Punjabi writer and novelist, one Ms. Ajeet Kaur. Her spine-chilling evidence narrated in chaste Punjabi, (and recorded under the auspices of the South Asia Literature program 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 <
The late P.V. Narasimha Rao, who was the Federal home (Police) minister and responsible for maintaining law and order in Delhi and other urban areas during those dark days, was fully aware of what was happening. But he chose not to deploy the Indian army (in an ‘Aid to Civil Power’ role) in time which could have prevented the bloody pogrom. The army was alerted at 2.30 pm on November 2. When the General Officer Commanding went to meet the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi for orders, he was kept waiting for hours. The first deployment of army soldiers took place around 6 pm on November 2 in south and central Delhi, which were comparatively unaffected, but in the absence of navigators, who should have been provided by the police and the civil authorities, the Army soldiers found themselves lost in unfamiliar roads and avenues. The army was deployed in East and West Delhi during the night of November 2. But, here, too, Army soldiers were at a loss because there were no navigators to show them the way through crisscrossing lanes and bylanes of Delhi. In any event, there was little the army could have done as civil magistrates were 'not available' to give permission to the Army units to fire on the rampaging mobs.
In his affidavit submitted to the G. T. Nanavati Commission many months later, inquiring into the pogrom, Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, much decorated hero of the 1971 war, told the commission that, 'The home minister was grossly negligent in his approach, which clearly reflected his connivance with perpetrators of the heinous crimes being committed against the Sikhs.' Since the horrible days of November 1984 one Sikh advocate in Delhi, Sirdar Harvinder Singh Phoolka, can be credited, more than anybody else, with single handedly keeping alive the legal fight for justice for the thousands of forgotten Sikh victims of the November 1984 state-sponsored and supervised anti/Sikh mass murders which were ordered by the then Indian Prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, before he was even formally sworn in in the parliament. A Sikh advocate Sirdar Harvinder Singh Phoolka has been the moving force behind setting up of the Citizen's Justice Committee website. (> http://www.carnage84.com/homepage/front.htm <) He has spearheaded one of the longest and most torturous legal battles for the victims of that 1984 anti/Sikh pogrom in which thousands of innocent Sikh men, women and children were murdered in Delhi alone, where hundreds of Sikh Gurdwaras were also desacralized/pillaged and personal property, movable and unmovable, worth hundreds of millions, was looted and burnt.
Senior advocate Sirdar Harvinder Singh Phoolka has written a book titled “When a Tree Shook Delhi,” released recently in Delhi, in which he has given a first hand account of his frustrations as a lawyer dealing with 1984 anti-Sikh riot cases in courts and before nine probe panels. Sirdar H. S. Phoolka Phoolka and co-author Manoj Mitta have concluded in despair that there is little scope left now for justice to the families of thousands of Sikhs massacred 23 years ago because of the role of a number of influential Congress party leaders and suppressive attitude of civil and police officials. See Tribune report on book at:> http://www.tribuneindia.com/2007/20071031/nation.htm#8 <
The slaughter was not limited to Delhi alone. Sikh men, women and children were murdered, and their properties burnt, in Gurgaon, Kanpur, Bokaro, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Simla, Jubblepur, Meerut, Indore, Moradabad and many other towns and cities across India. In a replay of the blood-letting in Delhi, 26 Sikh soldiers and officers of the Indian Army were pulled out of trains and lynched all over India. There has never been any effort to compute the death toll in these places, during those four dark days, but the most conservative all-India estimates have placed it at over 10,000 Sikh men, women and children murdered. When there were demands for a judicial inquiry to fix responsibility and add up the casualties, the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, for obvious reasons, stonewalled these demands. When some Human Rights organizations petitioned the courts, Prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's government declared that courts were not empowered to order inquiries.
It is common knowledge that the November 1984 bloody anti/Sikh pogrom was launched by a 'wink and a nod' from none other than the new appointed (not elected) Prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, whose first order of the day, after inheriting the Prime minister's office, through a backroom intrigue on October 31, 1984, was to mouth his wish of “teaching the bastards a lesson” as he had heard that the assassins of his mother, Indira Gandhi, looked like Sikhs. Rajiv Gandhi, later sought to justify the terror unleashed by his Congress party (on his ‘wink and a nod’ command) during an address to a rally at Delhi's Boat Club, on 19 November, 1984, assembled to celebrate his mother's (Indira Gandhi) birth anniversary. In his speech Rajiv Gandhi justified the murder of thousands of innocent Sikhs, two weeks earlier, by pontificating that, “Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed that India had been shaken. But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.” Above heartless quote culled from the recently published excellent book, on the November 1984 pogrom, by Senior Advocate Sirdar Harvinder Singh Phoolka titled, “When a Tree Shook Delhi.” And shake it did, ONLY for the Sikh minority!
The November 1984 mass murders of nearly ten thousand unarmed Sikh men, women and children in the capital city of India, Delhi, (and numerous other cities all over the country) are unique in the history of the subcontinent. The 31 October to 3 November, 1984, state-supervised pogrom was a repeat, where the Sikh minority - captive in India - is concerned, of an earlier June 1984 state-sponsored anti/Sikh assault, carried out by the Indian army (on the orders of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi) when it attacked, with tanks and artillery the holy Darbar Sahib complex in Amritsar. That June 1984 Army action destroyed the Akal Takht Sahib in the Darbar Sahib complex. In that military operation thousands of innocent Sikh pilgrims, who were visiting the Darbar Sahib complex, were also murdered. Synchronized with the Darbar Sahib operation in Amritsar, 37 other Sikh gurdwaras, located in the Sikh Homeland of Punjab, were also besieged attacked and desecrated in June 1984.
In these past 23 years, nine commissions and committees have been set up by the Indian government to look into different aspects of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom in which thousands of Sikhs were murdered all over India. Much bluster has been heard about bringing the guilty to book. What the Sikh minority community has seen is inertia, political intervention, and tardy prosecution. It clearly shows contempt for a monotheistic minority by the evil nexus of the polytheistic Brahmin/Bania nexus, which has ruled India ever since the Colonial British left the subcontinent in 1947. Overwhelming evidence against mass murderers like Jagdish Tytler (Sajjan Kumar, H. K. L. Bhagat and others) has been set aside by skullduggery and gerrymandering. Sirdar Harvinder Singh Phoolka, whose two decades-long magnificent effort has been mentioned above, was interviewed by the The Times of India - a newspaper not particularly known as being sympathetic to India's Sikh community. Readers are urged to read the Harvinder Singh Phoolka interview by clicking at the following link:> http://info.indiatimes.com/1984/21.htm < Also read Khalistan Calling, headlined, “The Indian demoNcracy, headed by a spineless ‘Sikh’ Prime minister, closes the case against Jagdish Tytler one of the main god fathers of the November 1984 state-sanctioned anti-Sikh pogrom in which over ten thousand innocents Sikhs were murdered. - Diaspora Sikhs suggest a posthumous public trial in an open People’s Court assembled outside India for mass-murderers PM’s Rajiv Gandhi & Indira Gandhi,,” by clicking at: > /home/khalistancalling/2007/october10.aspx < Today, on Wednesday, 31 October 2007, twenty three years after massacares, hundreds of survivors of the 1984 state-supervised anti-Sikh pogrom marched in a rally, in New Delhi, India, from Raj Ghat to the Supreme Court, demanding the apex court take action to punish the guilty like Jagdish Tytler and other Congress party leaders.
Twenty two million Sikhs, captive in Indian occupied Punjab, should take lesson from the recent Tehelka exposé, and note the scandalous role played by Gujarat’s Neo-Nazi Hindutva Chief Minister Narendra Modi, and his ‘sangh parivar’ in the post-Godhra anti-Muslim riots in 2002. That, the Gujrat State machinery was used for perpetrating genocide of the unarmed and timid Muslim minority in 2002 is well known. Past experience with the Indian state tells the minorities, like the Sikhs (Christians, Muslims, Tribals and others) that a mere expression of shock yet again is not going to help. However, it raises a few questions. Will the Tehelka tapes be taken as evidence by the Nanavati Commission (which Nanavati Commission also carried out a sham investigation of the November 1984 Anti-Sikh pogrom) currently inquiring into the Gujarat riots? Will the Indian Supreme Court take suo jure action against those shown bragging about their action during the riots and punish them? Will the centuries old tomb and mausoleum of that great Urdu poet Wali Gujarati, (razed to the ground on March 1, 2002, by Hindu mobs) be restored at its original site in Ahmedabad? Will the hundreds of thousands of Muslim rendered homeless be rehabilitated and their properties restored to them?
With the Tehelka exposé, the Indian minorities have been jolted, yet again, into the reality of ‘FREE’ India where there is no respect for the rule of law, for the security of life and freedom of choice, and all else that is humane. From the mass killings of innocent people under the eye of government agencies supposed to maintain law and order, onto rape, abduction, extortion and the organized killings of individuals by individuals who are bigoted and greedy, who use their money, status and connections with the powers-that-be to defy the law when it suits their immediate and parochial whims. It is clear that governance in India has ceased to exist for the ordinary, law-abiding citizens in general and members of any minority (like the Sikhs) in particular, who cannot exercise their choice within the democratic framework. India is in the throes of a civilization upheaval and the worst of the muck has risen to the surface. Excuses and explanations abound as the privileged, and those in authority, run to cover up, flaunting their cash and clout. Every single leader has condoned this horror because there is not one that is willing to speak out, tell people the truth, resign and walk away from the persistent corruption that has debilitated India. Power has become a cancer that has overwhelmed all politics — Right, Left and Centre — making this Indian demoNcracy the worst, living and thriving, banana republic which is being brutally destroyed by selfish politicians. Nothing can change the situation in India and make it humane!
The June 1984 and November 1984 holocausts have NOT been forgotten by the Sikhs. They will NEVER be forgotten! Sikhs have always remembered their martyrs and their holocausts, their ‘ghallugharas’. The older Sikh generations MUST make sure that the younger Sikhs, born in the 1980’s and later, are educated about the bloody Sikh experience of June and November 1984 and the part played by the evil mother and son, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, whose hands are covered with innocent Sikh blood. This younger Sikh generation needs to be educated about this evil and phony Nehru dynasty, which masquerades as a ‘Gandhi’ dynasty. The youngsters must be reminded about what happened in India, in June and November 1984, and who the guilty parties were, who ordered the two mass murders of thousands of their older Sikh compatriots? This education – this tutorial - would give meaning to the Sikh prayer “Raj Karayga Khalsa”, which ALL Sikhs repeat in their Gurdwaras every day. The “Raj Karayga Khalsa”, prayer calls for an independent, democratic, water-and-food-rich buffer state of Khalistan whose strategic location would enable the 25 million strong Sikh nation to prosper and act as a bridge of peace and commerce between South and Central Asia – importing Oil, Natural Gas, fruits and precious stones from Central Asia and exporting food, textiles, hosiery and light engineering goods etc., from South Asia.