Editor’s Note: The Supreme Court order asking the CBI to reopen the case against Congress leader Jagdish Tytler for his alleged role in the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi revives the macabre memories of a pogrom and the non-delivery of justice for its victims even after 30 years.Many of the traumatised survivors have either died or fled, while many others seeking a closure to their pain are unable to give up and are fighting a never-ending legal battle.
What drives them are their memories. Memories of one of the most cruel organised killings in contemporary India that the State had refused or failed to stop, or the Congress try to whitewash. For them, memory is the only weapon they have against the authors of the carnage.
No popular book on contemporary Indian history is complete without the 1984 pogrom. Accounts of 1984 in these books are strikingly similar, but are complexly nuanced when it comes to details and stories of personal tragedies and human suffering.
The account in William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns is one such story that makes for memorable reading. His intimate conversation with an old Sikh couple in Trilokpuri, who survived the carnage, although not without irreplaceable family loss, takes you back to those terrifying moments when death stares you in your face.
Dalrymple has graciously allowed us permission to republish the relevant portions from his book.
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Trilokpuri is the dumping ground for Delhi’s poor.
It was constructed on a piece of waste land on the far side of the Jumna during the Emergency of 1975. It was intended to house the squatters whom Sanjay Gandhi evicted from their makeshift shelters on the pavements of Central Delhi; the area remains probably the most desperately poor neighbourhood in the whole city. During 1984 it was here, well away from the spying eyes of the journalists, the diplomats and the middle classes, that the worst massacres took place: of the 2150 Sikhs murdered in the capital during the three days of rioting, the great majority were killed here.
It was a warm, early October afternoon when I set off to see Trilokpuri. I had never been across the Jumna before and did not know what to expect. Balvinder Singh drove past the battlements of the Old Fort of Humayun, over the Ring Road and headed on across the lower Jumna bridge — exactly the route that he and his cousins had taken in October 1984.
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| In this 2012 phtoo, an Sikh visitor looks at a photographic exhibition organised by Forgotten Citizens — 1984 on the 1984 massacre of nearly 3,000 Sikhs following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. AFP |
When the outside world first discovered the Trilokpuri massacres, long after the rioters had disappeared, it was Block 32 that dominated the headlines. Dogs were found fighting over piles of purple human entrails. Charred and roasted bodies lay in great heaps in the gullies; kerosene fumes still hung heavy in the air. Piles of hair, cut from the Sikhs before they were burned alive, lay on the verandas. Hacked-off limbs clogged the gutters.
Yet, as the journalists soon discovered, it was difficult to find anyone who admitted to being present during the madness. Everyone was vague and noncommittal: the killers were men from outside ; we were asleep; we saw nothing. Trying to find witnesses or survivors proved no easier five years later. I passed from block to block. What had once been a largely Sikh area was now entirely Hindu. The Sikhs had all moved, I was told. No, none of us were there at the time. We were visiting our villages when it happened. No, no one had seen anything. And the men sat cross-legged on their charpoys, gravely shaking their heads from side to side.
It was Balvinder who, while chatting in a chai shop, discovered that there was one solitary Sikh family left, in Block 30. They had been there at the time, he said, and had survived by hiding in a hole. Moreover, they were also witnesses; through a small chink they had seen everything.
Sohan Singh Sandhu was an old man in a cream-coloured salwar kameez. He had the bushiest eyebrows I have ever seen: they seemed to join with his mutton-chop whiskers and full, Babylonian beard so as to give the impression of a face peeping out through thick undergrowth. He sat cross-legged on a rope bed, backed by a frieze of Sikh holy pictures: icons of beards and swords and haloes filled the wall. Sohan Singh Sandhu was the granthi (reader) of the local gurdwara. He gave us his card, and while we settled ourselves down on his charpoy he shouted through to the kitchen, telling his wife — whom we had not yet seen — to bring us some tea.
His family had originally lived in a pukka house in Shastri Nagar, on the rich bank of the Jumna. But in 1975, during the Emergency, bulldozers flattened their home; they were given half an hour to move their valuables. According to the police, the demolitions were necessary to make way for a line of new electricity pylons, but the last time he had visited the site of his old house the land was still lying vacant. Much later they had received a plot in Trilokpuri, along with a government loan to cover building materials. His three sons and he had built the house with their own hands. It wasn’t a bad area, he said. A little out of the way, but quite tolerable. And their neighbours, who had suffered the same evictions as they, had always been friendly.
The troubles began quite suddenly on 1 November 1984. They had been anxiously listening to the news on the radio when a Sikh boy came running down the gully shouting that a mob, four or five thousand strong, was massing nearby.
‘About 150 of us assembled on the waste land at the edge of the block,’ said Sandhu. ‘The mob stoned us and we stoned them back. It was during the stoning that my son was hit.’
He pointed to a charpoy in a dark corner of the room. There, so silent that we had failed to notice him, lay a boy of about my own age. Like his father he had a full, uncut beard and a powerful physique. But he was behaving oddly. Although he could obviously hear that we were talking about him he still lay on his back on the rope bed, admiring himself in a rickshaw wing-mirror that he held in his hand.
‘He had bad head injuries,’ said his father quietly. ‘Now he has some mental problem.’
The boy ignored us and continued to stare at the mirror. As we watched, his face suddenly suffused with child-like happiness, and still looking at the mirror he burst into a fit of high-pitched giggles. His father frowned and looked away.
‘After the stone throwing had been going on for two hours the police suddenly intervened. They escorted the mob away, then returned and collected all our weapons: they took all our lathis (sticks) and kirpans (swords); they even took away the stones and the bricks that were lying around our houses. They said: “There is a curfew. Lock yourselves up.” When we had followed their instructions and retreated inside our houses, they let the mob loose.’
Groups of forty or fifty thugs descended on a single gully, flailing around them with their iron bars: ‘They would knock on a door. If it wasn’t opened they’d beat it down. Sometimes, when people had managed to barricade themselves in, they would climb up on the roof, break open the ceiling and pour in kerosene. Then they would burn everyone inside alive.’
‘They used our own kerosene,’ said Sandhu’s wife, appearing now with the tray of tea. She gave us each a glass and sat down on the bed beside her husband. ‘They stole it from us then used it to murder us.’
‘Once they shouted: “Send out the men and we won’t harm them.” A couple of doors opened and some of our neighbours gave themselves up. They took them away. It was only later that we discovered they had taken them to the edge of the block, made them drink kerosene then set them alight.’
‘How did you manage to escape?’ I asked.
‘Look,’ said Sandhu. And getting up from the charpoy he pulled back a drape which covered the top of one wall. Behind lay a tiny cubby-hole filled with a metal trunk and two packing-cases laid end to end. ‘Ranjit,’ he indicated the son still lying in the corner, ‘Ranjit and I hid in there for three days.’
‘But you couldn’t possibly have fitted,’ I said.
‘We managed,’ replied Sandhu. ‘There was no other choice.’
‘Did they never think of looking behind the drapes?’ I asked.
‘We scattered all our jewellery and valuables at the front of the house. Most of the mob were interested only in looting. They took the jewellery and forgot about us.’ Sandhu smiled: ‘Once one of their leaders — a local Congress politician — came inside and rebuked them: “You are just looting,” he said. “You should be killing.” He flicked back the drape and saw our attic but we had placed the cases and mattresses in front of us. He said: “It is too small. Nobody can hide there.”
‘That was the worst moment. I whispered to Ranjit: “Do not be afraid. It will be a quick pain, then it will be over.” And I told him that he was a Sikh and that he must be brave. I said: “They have to kill you. When the moment comes do not beg them for your life.” ’
‘You were very lucky,’ I said.
‘I was,’ replied Sandhu. ‘But my other two sons were less fortunate. On the second day they were discovered hiding in the shop of some Hindu friends. The mob burned the shop. Then they put rubber tyres around the necks of my sons, doused them with petrol and burned them too.’
The old man was sitting cross-legged beside his wife. His voice was lowered yet he spoke almost matter-of-factly. Up to that point he had hardly mentioned his other two sons at all.
‘God is behind every act,’ he said. ‘There must have been something wrong that we did in the past.’
‘Yet you were spared.’
‘It was not our turn,’ he replied. ‘That was why we were saved.’ He shrugged and pointed to the ceiling: ‘He is the one who saves.’
There was a halt in the conversation. There was nothing more to say.
Sandhu brought out an album of old photographs: the two dead boys 1 formal black and white studio photographs, two youths in turbans staring straight at the camera, one with heavy plastic glasses, the other with a slight squint; a shot of the wreckage in the house after the looting — clothes strewn everywhere, smashed crockery, a half-burned charpoy; a snap of a smashed-up autorick shaw, a lump of buckled metal with a frosted windscreen.
‘That was Ranjit’s,‘ said his father. ’He used to be a driver.‘
For a few seconds no one spoke. Then I asked: ‘Aren’t you frightened it might happen again?’
‘No: now we are no longer worried. I am still the granthi of the gurdwara. I give langar (food) to the poor Hindus; the rich Hindus give us offerings. These wounds are healed now.’
‘But isn’t it upsetting to stay on in the same street? To live where your children were murdered?’
‘Personally I would like to leave. To return to the Punjab. It is my wife who wishes to stay. She says: “This is where my children used to eat, to sleep, to play, to laugh …”’
‘I feel they are still here,’ said Mrs Sandhu. ‘They built this house with their hands. They fitted the bricks and the mud.’ She shook her head. ‘Since they died not for one day have I left this place. I will die here.’
On the bed in the corner, her one surviving son suddenly broke out laughing again. We all turned towards him. He was still staring at himself in the wing-mirror of his old rickshaw.
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Republished with the permission of City of Djinns author William Dalrymple.