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1984 carnage: India’s conscience still bleeds

Every journalist worth his salt, who reported the 1984 killings, can join the dots with precision

Amit Sengupta Delhi Hardnews

Quite apparently, the dubious, cold-blooded section of the Congress leadership is unhappy. These are the kind of people who were earlier hobnobbing with the ex-loyalists of Narendra Modi during the Gujarat assembly elections, including Gordhan Zadaphia who was the home minister presiding over the carnage in 2002. These are the hollow, stuffed men who must have advised Sonia Gandhi never to visit former Congress MP Ehsan Jaffrey's house in ravaged Gulberg Society in Ahmedabad or meet his shattered wife, so that the politics of 'soft Hindutva' can continue in Gujarat as a mirror image of Modi's Hindutva.

Predictably, the Congress-NCP regime did not move one inch on the Srikrishna Commission report on the Bombay pogrom of 1992-93 against the Muslims, with the Congress government then at the helm. Even while, most of the 1993 serial blasts accused have been convicted.  If this is not brazen denial of justice, what is? And how is the Congress more secular than the others?

Literally, despite overwhelming support of large sections, including adivasis in the last Lok Sabha elections in Gujarat, these political advisors, especially one worthy from Gujarat with no mass base, who advises Sonia Gandhi, proved to be complete strategic failures. This, in a situation where the BJP won several seats by very small margins in both the assembly elections after 2002 and almost 40 per cent plus people voted for the Congress, thereby proving Narendra Modi's homogenous 'five crore Gujarati' theory null and void.

These are prototypes who are strictly myopic and ruthless, looking for short-term gains and completely bereft of a knowledge system or political and social vision. They have no regard for conventional norms of decency or feelings and sensitivity of the civil society or the larger future of democracy. Utterly mediocre and low calibre, something amazingly characteristic of not only the Congress but most political parties in India, for this particularly vicious parasitic class, the mass murder of innocent citizens is like a dot which needs to be just whitewashed and forgotten in the unilateral quest for power.

However, you can pretend to whitewash organised brutality, but you can't really brainwash the people and eliminate the ghastly spectacles embedded in people's memories. Every journalist worth his salt, who reported the 1984 killings, can join the dots with precision: apart from local goons and politicos, the names which flashed in the ravaged bylanes were predictable - HKL Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, Arjun Das, Dharamdas Shastri, Lalit Maken and Jagdish Tytler. All Congress politicians. Read the first credible report by PUCL-PUDR: Who are the guilty?

How come they trust the intelligence of the Indian voters so much, but refuse to acknowlege his/her political intelligence and social conscience? If the political class lacks a conscience, how do they presume that the people too should become their prototypes in their cracked mirror? The vast majority of the "Indian masses" really do not need the Indian State to feed them. In abject poverty, they survive on hard labour and resilience in amazingly adverse circumstances. But when it comes to injustice, they will not forget, they will not forgive, and they will never let them get away. One day the memory, angst and anger will yet again return -- in words, images and actions. And this time it did in the form of a shoe: the shoe of journalist Jarnail Singh.

No wonder the Congress top brass has egg on its face, even while the prime minister is now reportedly asking the CBI as to how it gave a clean chit to Jagdish Tytler on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections. The uncanny biased timing was as brazenly jarring as it was transparent - so was it an inside job calculated to create 'Advantage Tytler'? And, how could Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, their clean image notwithstanding, accept such a crude decision - in complete disregard of the infinite pain in the hearts of the survivors of the November 1984 organised genocide of Sikhs in Delhi? And, how did the names of Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler allowed to be celebrated as Congress candidates in the first place, when the prime minister, himself a Sikh, had called the massacre a "national shame", and similar expressions have been uttered by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi?

If crude vote bank politics ignores ethical decisions and democratic principles of humanism and justice, it cannot eliminate the realism of the big picture. So, is it only the Sikhs of Delhi, Haryana and Punjab who were being 'appeased' by the removal of Tytler and Sajjan Kumar purely because of electoral reasons? And, why only the Sikhs? This is as bad and as crass as it can get.

Every student, academic, journalist, housewife, lawyer and others who worked in relief camps in November 1984 and later would testify that the massacre was organised, planned and executed meticulously, with local individuals in certain localities like Trilokpuri and Jehangirpuri in Delhi, and that it was instigated publicly by infamous Congress politicians, and that the top leadership in the government twiddled their thumbs when the bloodbath and gang-rapes were going on. The government washed its hands off for more than 48 hours, while the killings continued, and later as well, taking no responsibility for the thousands of refugees who cowered in fear and hunger in the relief camps in trans Yamuna and elsewhere. It was a citizen's group, the Nagarik Ekta Manch, hundreds of volunteers who worked in the camps, risking their lives, even while aware that every night would bring the phobia of armed mob attacks on the camps. Exactly like what happened in Ahmedabad, 2002. This was no riot. This was State-sponsored genocide.

I, too, was a student volunteer from JNU and young reporter then, and every narrative of rape and murder has been etched in my mind. Every lane in Block 32, Trilokpuri, devastated and looted of its dignity and humanity, will testify this truth. In words, reports and protests on the streets, I have joined thousands of citizens and many of them were not Sikhs. All Indian citizens with a conscience are outraged; they know that it is a "national shame" and there has been no justice even after 25 years. Like them, I too will never forget or forgive or let them get away.

And, I am not a Sikh or an artificial vote-bank. I am a secular citizen of pluralist India, like all Sikhs of India, because we all have a conscience and we are all angry and disgusted. Unlike the rulers who are neither shamed nor ashamed.

That is why, mere withdrawal of tickets to Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler due to public outrage and with the fear of losing vote-banks, means nothing. Because the wounds remain as fresh as ever. Surely, the prime minister feels it, as deeply as all of us.