Thomas Bernhard, the great Austrian author, created several curious
characters in his short play “The German Lunch Table.” An ordinary
extended family sits down for a meal around a “natural oak” table, but
somewhere down the line they find Nazis in the soup.
Nazis in the soup. Nazi soup.
The mother complains: When I open packages of noodles in the kitchen, I
find Nazis inside the packages and they always enter the soup.
When I first read the play, I wondered if it could be adapted for
Indian stage, especially in the context of the Sikh pogrom in November
1984 in the days following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.
My first response, and I have not been able to revise it, was that
the Bernhard play would fail to work in India because the perpetrators
and the organizers of the pogrom were never punished. Some of the
accused rose to become ministers in the Congress government; some became
members of the Indian Parliament. In the Indian context, it is the
victims and survivors who have a real and pressing need to hide inside
packets of noodles. From time to time, their impoverished bodies and
ghostly voices do manage to enter the soups served on powerful lunch
tables in the Indian capital. At times, the dead themselves enter the
curries of those who shield the guilty or suppress or silence a tragic
history.
In Delhi, every year busloads of tourists visit the memorials
established by the Indian government for the late Prime Ministers Indira
Gandhi, and her son Rajiv Gandhi. These “memorials” are “forgetorials”;
they do not inform the visitors of the chillingly sinister
justification provided by Mr. Gandhi for the Sikh pogrom: “The ground
does shake when a big tree falls.”
I was a teenager in Delhi in November 1984, when Mr. Gandhi spoke
those words. My father was an officer in the Indian armed forces. We
rented an apartment in a yellow government-owned block in Sector 3, Rama
Krishna Puram in south Delhi. Before the mob appeared, Father had
called his regiment, requesting two security guards, but for some reason
the guards were unable to make it on time. A mob passed by our block,
attacking the Sikhs they saw on the streets. We took refuge in our Hindu
neighbor’s house. Even there we could hear the acoustics of the mob,
the barbaric slogans. “
Khoon ka badla khoon say (Blood for blood).”
We were the lucky ones. We were spared. Around 20 minutes later, the
mob passed our apartment block. I recall hearing a couple of gunshots
fired in the air, followed by a dead silence, and the loud racist and
bloodthirsty slogans receding, as if a demonstration of the Doppler
effect.
The few hours we were in the neighbor’s house fill an enormous space
in my mind. How many of my assumptions collapsed that afternoon. I have
not been able to articulate those few hours, the burned remains of the
buildings I saw later and the tiny particles of ash floating in air.
Eventually two security guards appeared at our door, but I didn’t feel
safe. I have tried hard to forget those moments, but they stand in my
way.
We were unaware at that point that the ruling Congress Party was
using all the organs of the Indian state to conduct a pogrom. The
state-controlled All India Radio announced that, barring a few little
incidents, the “situation was under control.” The state-controlled
television, Doordarshan broadcast live the national mourning as Mrs.
Gandhi’s body lay in state (with Bergmanesque closeups of her face). But
the soundtrack was the soundtrack of the “mob” created by the cabinet
ministers and members of parliament, as we found out later.
Khoon ka Badla Khoon Say.
Blood for Blood. Most of the Indian press collaborated with the
government in the coverage of the pogrom. The Indian Express newspaper
was one of the few honorable exceptions.
Last December in Delhi after the brutal gangrape of a 23-year-old
student, I witnessed demonstrations in several neighborhoods in the city
and attended a panel at a research library. There was a long and
chilling pause in the audience when the panelists pointed out the
silences around sexual violence that took place in 1984 pogrom. Several
Sikh women were gangraped. Others lost as many as 21 members of their
extended families in a single day.
The aching spectacle and the acoustics created by mobs are too
horrific to describe in detail. Many victims had been earlier displaced
by the Partition of India in 1947 and later by Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency
in 1975. Most led impoverished existence in resettlement colonies on the
fringes of Delhi weaving jute cots or working as carpenters or
ironsmiths.
Public buses and trains were used by the state to transport paid
mobs. Voters’ lists were used to mark Sikh houses and businesses
overnight. Most victims were burned with the aid of kerosene or a white
inflammable powder. More than four thousand Sikhs were burned alive in
Delhi alone. Untold number of Sikh men were set on fire in more than
forty cities throughout India. The mobs, it is well documented, were
given money, liquor, kerosene, and instructions by senior Congress
leaders. India’s then home minister did nothing while the city of Delhi
started smelling of human flesh and burning rubber tires. Delhi Police
actively participated in the orgy. Prominent citizens and lawyers begged
the prime minister to act, but he did nothing for four days. This kind
of coordination of the state apparatus to kill its own citizens in such
large numbers only a few blocks from the Parliament was unsurpassed in
Indian history.
A few days later, Prime Minster Rajiv Gandhi, a Cambridge dropout, used really bad physics to justify the pogrom:
When a big tree falls, the earth shakes.
The anti-Sikh “riot,” was mostly mentioned in the Indian public sphere
as a footnote to Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Barring the exceptions
of Urvashi Butalia’s
The Other Side of Silence and Amitav Ghosh’s 1995 essay, The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi in
The New Yorker,
most Indian writers were reluctant to engage with that horrific past.
Things are changing slowly. Several human rights reports and a few books
have appeared, the most significant one being,
When a Tree Shook Delhi
by the distinguished journalist Manoj Mitta and the Supreme Court
lawyer, H. S. Phoolka. Among other aspects it examines the role played
by Delhi Police in facilitating the atrocity, and the sinister role
played by the judiciary afterwards. A few documentaries have been made
and a feature film, Amu by Shonali Bose appeared a few years earlier.
Almost three decades and several judicial commissions later, not a
single politician, cabinet minister, bureaucrat, diplomat, judge, or a
high-ranking police officer has been brought to justice. Witnesses have
been pressurized, offered huge amounts of money, harmed physically and
emotionally, and even killed. In April 2013, a Delhi court acquitted
Sajjan Kumar, a Congress leader from Delhi and one of the main accused
in the pogrom. Last week, the Delhi High court rejected his appeals and
decided to continue his trial. In 2009, Jagdish Tytler, another Congress
leader accused of involvement in the pogrom, was exonerated by the
India’s federal investigation agency, Central Bureau of Investigation.
Indian courts offered a modicum of hope by ordering the CBI to continue
investigating Mr. Tytler’s role in the pogrom.
The Justice Nanavati Commission had indicted both Mr. Tytler and Mr.
Kumar in its 2005 report on the carnage. “The Commission considers it
safe to record a finding that there is credible evidence against Shri
Jagdish Tytler to the effect that very probably he had a hand in
organizing attacks on Sikhs,” the Nanavati Commission report remarked.
The report added that, “there is credible material against Shri Sajjan
Kumar and Shri Balwan Khokhar for recording a finding that he and Shri
Balwan Khokhar were probably involved as alleged by the witnesses.”
Kamal Nath, another main accused, is a senior cabinet minister in the
current administration; he represented India at the World Economic
Forum in Davos earlier this year. Several witnesses have testified that
Mr. Nath was present at Rakabganj Sahib gurudwara and directed and
instigated mobs.
In 1984 Rakabganj Sahib, a heritage gurudwara, only a few blocks away
from the Parliament, was a target. In the first week of June, as the
Indian press reported plans for laying a foundation stone for a November
1984 Sikh massacre memorial at Rakabganj Sahib, the Congress government
in Delhi set about creating hurdles to prevent its construction. The
initiative for the memorial came from Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management
Committee (DSGMC) after a change in its leadership from a pro-Congress
party group to an anti-Congress party group. The New Delhi Municipal
Corporation (NDMC) warned the organizing body against building an
“illegal structure” in the gurudwara complex.
Why exactly this opposition to remembrance of lives and communities destroyed in 1984?
Such
control over sites of traumatic memory suggests the state is deeply
anxious about restoration of forgotten histories, especially the crimes
it committed against its own citizens in the recent past. The memorial
will necessarily question the official narrative around ‘what to
remember’ and ‘how to remember’. In India, it seems, only the party in
power has the supreme right to build memorials, and the ones it keeps
constructing with obsessive zeal are around the lives and deaths of
so-called great leaders. Yet India has no memorials for around 1.5
million people killed and over 12 million displaced during the violent
Partition, accompanying the birth of India and Pakistan in 1947.
Memory, W.G. Sebald wrote, even if you repress it, will come back at
you and it will shape your life. Not so long ago I asked my own family
members, once again, about their memories of November 1984. My sister
told me how she has sought to erase the memories of her school, which
was looted, partially destroyed, and set on fire by a mob. During those
couple of hours in the neighbour’s house, I still recall, she kept
saying, “Let’s go home. I have to finish my homework.” She was 12.
My father recalled his journey home from work on the evening of
October 31. He was the commanding officer of the Signal Regiment
(E-Block) near the Parliament. When the officers’ van passed by the All
India Institute of Medical Sciences in central Delhi, he saw some signs
of violence through the van window. As the violence intensified on
November 1, 1984, father received several desperate calls from his Sikh
staff members: junior officers, signalmen, radio and cipher operators.
He dispatched a Hindu driver to rescue them.
My mother said she had nothing to say. When I insisted, she told me
about the regiment driver. Ishwar, the driver, called very late on the
night of November 1. She had answered the phone. Ishwar was crying. “He
told your father the details of the day, almost like an entry in a log
book,” she said Then he broke down. Ishwar had driven for nine hours
through Delhi, through fire and smoke, bodies and ash. He had rescued
dozens of Sikh men and brought their families to the safety of a
barbed-wire camp in Khanpur area in south Delhi. Many more needed help.
Ishwar had not slept or eaten for the last sixteen hours. He could no
longer stare in the eye of the horror.
“Your father tried to persuade Ishwar to make one more trip,” mother
recalled. “But Ishwar broke down.” My mother was silent for a while. She
spoke about Ishwar’s sobbing, crackling voice, and the complete
collapse of language. “To this day I hear Ishwar’s voice and his
scream,” mother said, her eyes filled with moisture. When she spoke
several hours later, she asked me a question about the novel I was
working on. I could see that she felt like saying something to me, but
she was unable to do so…
On June 12, the foundation stone of the Sikh pogrom memorial was laid
at Rakabganj Sahib gurudwara complex. Building a memorial obviously
raises huge questions. What event will be remembered and how will it be
remembered? Will there be a single one or a plurality of memorials? How
will one ensure that the memorialization project respects the dead and
not reduce itself into a showcase for competing political agendas?
The memorials and their materiality may or may not allow mourning,
and may or may not help healing. But there is one memorial the city of
Delhi needs urgently, the one that would really honor the dead and
restore humanity to the living, a memorial that would bring an end to
infinite impunity the Indian political class enjoys after organizing,
inciting, and enabling collective violence and after conducting pogroms.
Jaspreet Singh’s most recent novel, “Helium,” will be published in August by Bloomsbury.
