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| Science Forum Index » Military - Naval Forum » No justice for India's Sikhs... |
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| PakistanPal... |
 Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:09 pm |
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India must reveal the true scale of the 1984 Sikh massacre and bring
its architects to account
Schona Jolly
Twenty five years ago, on the morning of 1 November 1984, I woke up in
London to get ready for school. My parents, of Indian Sikh origin, sat
staring at the television screen. Nobody told us to brush our teeth,
or to stop messing around with our Ready Brek. Shocked phone calls
replaced our daily routine. The massacre of 4,000 innocent Sikhs in
Delhi, and beyond, had begun. Much of the world's media has allowed
the Indian government to portray what happened as an "explosion of
grief" in response to Indira Gandhi's assassination by her two Sikh
bodyguards following her orders on Operation Bluestar. The truth,
however, is far more chilling.
The 10 days that followed Gandhi's assassination are documented
extensively in eyewitness testimony. Unsubstantiated rumours began to
spread on the night of 31 October that Sikhs were celebrating Gandhi's
murder. By early the following morning, gangs of young men were
setting alight parts of south Delhi that today are among the most
elite residential neighbourhoods of the city. In Delhi, in Kanpur and
in Calcutta, the police and political forces stood by while the fury
of part of the population was unleashed in burnings, killings and
horror. Women were gang-raped - a tactic later employed in Gujarat -
and gurdwaras, homes and Sikh businesses were destroyed. There is
evidence that Delhi's public buses were used to transport the gangs
from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. The army was not called on to the
streets on the morning of 1 November. No curfew was imposed until most
of the damage was done. No credible explanation for this has ever been
provided.
Two and a half decades later, the language used to describe that night
remains as blurry as ever. Was it a genocide? Who drew up lists of
identification? Why did the police disappear or intervene to protect
the mobs rather than the victims? Did Rajiv Gandhi, the incumbent
prime minister, encourage the murders through his statements on the
radio? Did members of Congress incite the killings? Why did ministers
fail to act when they had been warned by the army that a "holocaust"
might be unleashed that very night? Who kept the army at bay? In
short, was this state-sponsored violence of the order that led to
another decade of brutality in which some 10,000 Punjabi Sikhs, mostly
men, were "disappeared" by the state?
India is right to trumpet its many achievements over the last decade.
They are well documented. But the country's progress is littered with
reminders of a dangerous past which its own government has planted and
then tried to bury. Unfortunately, the secular credentials of prime
minister Manmohan Singh's Congress government are not all that they
appear to be.
The Nanavati Commission was set up in 2000 to investigate the events
with broad terms of reference. Four years later it reported back that
the state had been involved. Politicians were implicated heavily, but
no action taken against them. International organisations have heavily
criticised the state's actions and the impunity with which the police
have proceeded in Punjab and Delhi over this period, and the
subsequent episode of so-called counter-insurgency operations in
Punjab. In 2007, India's CBI finally announced that it was closing the
case on 1984 for lack of evidence, in spite of extensive eyewitness
testimony both to the violence, as well as to the involvement of
police and politicians. In the 1994 report Dead Silence: Legacy of
Abuses in Punjab, Human Rights Watch Asia and Physicians for Human
Rights described the government operations in Punjab during the 1980s
as "the most extreme example of a policy in which the end appeared to
justify any and all means, including torture and murder". Still the
Congress government of India stays quiet. Indeed, Manmohan Singh even
described the torture, killings and disappearances as "aberrations" in
the fight against terrorism.
Insaaf means justice in many Indian languages. No justice has been
done for India's Sikhs, who represent just 2% of the population but
whose culture, language and music now form the background to hit after
Bollywood hit.
The Indian government, even with a Sikh at its head, has studiously
refused to contemplate the truth of what has happened. For many of
India's political and social elite, it is more convenient to forget
than to confront. Why dredge up memories that are painful, and which
threaten a peaceful coexistence between ethnic and religious
communities, they say. The danger in that path is that what has
happened before can happen again. It happened in Godhra in Gujarat in
1992, and still Narendra Modi - who is said to be the chief architect
of that genocide against the Gujarati Muslim population - retains
power.
International law and principles demand that states conduct effective
investigations and hold perpetrators accountable. In country after
country where a population has brutalised its minority, and in the
case of South Africa its majority, there has needed to be an open
reconciliation with the truth. It can take the form of truth
commissions, like those in South Africa or in Salvador or Guatemala,
or it can take the form of court actions like in Rwanda, Argentina and
Chile, where the most powerful members of society, including army
generals or even Pinochet himself, have been successfully prosecuted
for their pivotal role in the disappearances of so many thousands of
men.
It is not enough that the Delhi courts very recently convicted local
small fry for their complicity in murder and criticised the Indian
police for their role in the 1984 killings. The Indian government
needs both to bring accountability and to be accountable in order to
ensure that the architects and orchestrators are not allowed to get
away with their actions .
Last week, Human Rights Watch urged India, as the world's largest
democracy, to take a global role in influencing Burma, Sri Lanka and
Nepal. But until the truth of the extent of state-sponsored murder on
ethnic lines, both in the 1984 pogroms and the subsequent
disappearances that ripped through Punjab's male population, is
revealed, the country's reputation will remain besmirched.
Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/31/india-sikhs-1984-massacre |
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