Remembering the Past: Critical Perspectives on the Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984
Edited by Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry, with a Foreword by Amritjit Singh
Orient BlackSwan, pages, Rs 1,285

The systematic pogrom targeting Sikhs in 1984, in the national capital and elsewhere in India, remains a deeply painful episode in our post-independence history. In October of that year, as the nation was still grappling with the repercussions of Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi became a pretext for shocking anti-Sikh violence that lasted several days, resulting in over 3,000 deaths in Delhi alone, and the dispossession of many more.

Over four decades on, it is crucial to understand the impact of this violence and its aftermath. What caused this rupture in the secular fabric of the country? How were mobs emboldened to act violently for days, with little fear of accountability? How can civil society work towards repairing the fissures created by such an occurrence?

‘Remembering the Past’ brings together a nuanced set of essays that address these questions, and the historical, political, social, and literary aspects of the carnage of 1984. The chapters foreground the personal experiences of women survivors and witnesses; engage with oral narratives and modes of community memorialisation; and offer literary analyses of novels, short stories and films that portray the events of 1984. Significantly, the book also features contributions by academics and civil society members who organised collective action against rioting, participated in relief and rehabilitation efforts, and published fact-finding reports.

Here is an excerpt from the Foreword by Amritjit Singh, who is Langston Hughes Professor Emeritus of English and African American Studies, Ohio University:

Bearing Witness

The days and months immediately following November 1984 were extremely difficult for most Sikhs in India, especially those who lived in various regions of India away from Punjab. They felt vulnerable and disturbed by how they were being asked to defend or explain crimes they had not committed. Even Sikhs in Punjab and Delhi felt mistrust and suspicion directed at them by their neighbours, long-time friends and colleagues—this was evoked with great resonance by novelist Amitav Ghosh in his essay, ‘The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi’” (New Yorker 1995). It became easy to attach the label ‘Khalistani’ to suppress disagreements, even harass or expel Sikh colleagues at work. Unless you were a ‘cut Surd’, you were no longer viewed as a secular Indian citizen (Singh 2017). A statement made by the newly chosen Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi illustrates the nature of the new challenges Sikhs in and around Delhi faced. Nineteen days after the assassination, at a Boat Club rally, Rajiv Gandhi said, ‘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’ (cited in Singh 1990: 235). The Congress party won an unprecedented margin of victory in December 1984 by using dog-whistles that inverted widely held positive stereotypes of Sikhs as honest, generous and trustworthy people (The New York Times 1985).

Sikhs who lived abroad on timebound or permanent resident visas faced their own challenges. Worried about the nascent unpredictability of India’s political life, Sikh citizens in Canada and the US began applying for landed immigrant status for their immediate families in India. Like most other Sikhs in the US, I recall feeling compelled to deal with two issues immediately: (i) to ascertain the safety and well-being of loved ones who lived in India and (ii) to educate Americans about who Sikhs were—our origins, our beliefs, our looks and our lives. With a dear old friend, I started working on a Q&A booklet on Sikhs and Sikhism. Between stressful daily routines and our differences on what to include, that worthy project fell apart quickly. Fortunately, gurdwaras in the UK and North America reprinted publications such as ‘Who Are the Guilty?’ (produced by Rajni Kothari and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties [PUCL]), which were then widely distributed among concerned global citizens.

My young family and I lived in New York, as did my eldest sister. Four of my siblings (two brothers and two sisters) lived in north India at the time. I was relieved to connect quickly with three of my four siblings in India—they were scared but safe. Every expensive phone call was riddled with myriad stories of uncertainty and precarity: friends or neighbours who had lost their lives or barely survived the violence; Sikh homes and businesses vandalised and destroyed, including two factories owned by my uncles in the Kirti Nagar Industrial Area; neighbourhood gurdwaras attacked and the Holy Granth desecrated, its pages strewn in the streets; and the occasional kindness of strangers or acquaintances. My four siblings and I were deeply frustrated in our efforts to reach our youngest sister, who lived in Kanpur with her husband and two young sons. As in Delhi, scores of Sikh families in Kanpur had also suffered attacks on their lives and properties. In desperation, I contacted my dear friend Chaudhri Harish Chandra, a Punjabi Hindu who was a well-respected professor of English at the prestigious Christ Church College in Kanpur. At serious risk to his own personal safety during the curfew days of mid-November 1984, Harish managed to reach my sister’s residence in Civil Lines and used his suave charm to wangle some basic information from their protective neighbour: my sister and her family were alive, having narrowly escaped getting killed; they had been forced to cut their hair and remove other symbols of Sikh identity, such as the kara and the turban; and all four of them were hiding in a very small space, barely enough for them to breathe in and survive. (Years later, I came to associate that space in my imagination with the ‘tiny crawling space’, 9x7x3 feet, that Linda Brent, aka Harriet Jacobs, describes in ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’, 1861 [Chapter 21].)

Trauma is neither logical nor open to correction. Like grief in Emily Dickinson’s poem (‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes—’), post-traumatic stress is unpredictable and chooses its own course. Appearing and reappearing at its own will, it hits you the most when you expect it the least. The shock of what happened in 1984 has travelled across oceans to penetrate the diaspora and is likely to get passed on from one generation to the next. Forgetting may be easily, breezily recommended by well-wishers and casual observers, and it may even be attempted by those affected, but it is really hard to accomplish. A well-meaning friend, an Indian diplomat serving then in Vancouver, BC, advised me by phone to forget what happened and move on. I had to grit my teeth not to hang up on him. (On 7 April 2009, a young Sikh journalist Jarnail Singh had hurled a shoe at India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram, when the minister made a similar suggestion in response to the journalist’s energetic questioning about why those Congress leaders such as H. K. L. Bhagat who had led the mobs in November 1984 had not been brought to justice 25 years after the tragedy [The Economic Times 2009].)

We continue to learn the value of ‘bearing witness’ from its skilful uses over decades in Holocaust studies: the importance of preserving human dignity on the part of victims and survivors, finding ways of processing the experience and acquiring empathy and support, and demonstrating the possibilities of resistance to prevent any group from being seen as hapless victims. In Holocaust studies, survivors’ testimony and video representations are important resources towards the goal of ‘bearing witness’. As an example of bearing witness to 1984, the widely travelled poetic performance ‘Kultar’s Mime’ by Sarabpreet Singh achieves a powerful representation of how November 1984 violence affected Sikh children in Delhi (Kumar 2014).

[...] In relation to the sectarian violence that South Asia has experienced in 1947, 1971, 1984 and 2002, it would help to heed Ravinder Kaur’s important reminder:

“The idea is not only to honour the dead, to heal the wounds and to give voice to those silenced, but also to serve as a deterrent for future generations, as a reminder of destruction that human beings are capable of unleashing. In short, choosing to remember or forget, to publicly speak or remain silent are always deeply political gestures.” (Kaur 2021)

As each of us make our ‘political gestures’ or ethical choices, I hope that as the largest democracy in the world, as the fabled home to figures such as Buddha, Kabir, Guru Nanak Dev and M. K. Gandhi, and as the nation that was the first to honour Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, India would do well to pursue Dr King’s dream of building his cherished ‘beloved community’, wherein no one feels left out and where every citizen feels cherished and has a seat at the table.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]