Prism of intolerance

There are few comparisons on the face of it. One a revengeful pogrom that saw scores of unsuspecting Sikhs being pulled out of their homes and slaughtered on the streets, right in front of their mothers, wives and sisters. And the other a communal ‘clash’ 30 years on that saw shops gutted, frenzied stone pelting and many injured, some seriously. But the twin echoes of intolerance and impunity in Trilokpuri ring just as loud as they did in 1984 — stretching thin the fabric of oneness so tenuously woven together over the years.

The scruffy east Delhi locality of narrow lanes and cheek-by-jowl houses that scream aloud the daily livelihood struggles of its residents is once again in the news. For riots that broke out just before Diwali and for the clouds of distrust that hang heavy over its volatile bylanes. And that its residents once again cower in uncertainty, three decades to the day after the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984 led to an estimated 3,000 Sikhs being killed in the national capital, can only be irony of the most savage kind.

Trilokpuri — amongst the resettlement colonies set up during Emergency by Indira Gandhi where slum dwellers were forcibly moved to after their homes elsewhere in the city were demolished — became perhaps the bloodiest chapter of that terrible autumn of 1984 when Sikhs were targeted not just in New Delhi but also in towns like Kanpur to avenge the assassination of the Prime Minister by her Sikh bodyguards.

More than 320 Sikhs were killed in Block 32 of Trilokpuri alone. “It was just like some place where you slaughter animals except in this case they slaughtered the Sikhs -- 320 of them in these two very, very narrow lanes. There was hair lying all over the place, there was blood, there were fingers, arms, legs and heads,” senior journalist Rahul Bedi, one of the first journalists to enter Trilokpuri on the evening of November 1, 1984, wrote on the 25th anniversary of the massacre.

Words that chill, a descriptive that shakes the very fundamentals of humanity and humaneness.  But this is not about Trilokpuri alone, of course. The flashback into the past – prompted by the eerie coincidence of a 30-year anniversary of the worst sectarian violence since Partition and an outbreak of communal tension in the very same lanes at the exact same time – is also a mirror to the present India of polarisation and continuing governmental negligence in prosecuting the guilty.

In their meticulously documented report, Who Are The Guilty, the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) had said at the time that the murderous attacks on the Sikh community in Delhi and its suburbs “far from being a spontaneous expression of ‘madness’ and of popular ‘grief and anger’ at Mrs. Gandhi's assassination as made out to be by the authorities, were the outcome of a well organised plan marked by acts of both deliberate commissions and omissions by important politicians of the Congress (I) at the top and by authorities in the administration”.
In the decades since, there has been little justice for the victims of the carnage. Manoj Mitta, co-author of When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath, estimates that the total number of convictions for the main charge of murder is “no more than 30 in a dozen cases”. He has also pointed out that Parliament is yet to pass a resolution on the carnage!

Add to this the fact that Congress leaders like Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler still walk free despite allegations and eyewitness accounts that they actively incited the rioters and the picture of impunity and indeed, insouciance, to a mass tragedy is pretty much complete. The story of other riots in the country has been tragically similar with the guilty most often getting away with murder.

And it is in the otherwise nondescript Trilokpuri that the past and the present have segued together seamlessly, its urban sprawl just one of the playing grounds of polarised politics in communal times.

For Charanjeet Singh, one of the 10 families left behind in Trilokpuri from then, it was like a cruel joke being replayed. He was just a teenager then but the memories are vivid. Then too, the 45-year-old shopkeeper told a reporter, they had been confined to their homes and it was the same now. Part of an aspirational India looking to move ahead to a prosperous tomorrow, Charanjeet Singh must wonder at the twist of fate that saw his neighbourhood return as the centre of a communal cauldron.

There are several theories on how the violence broke out. A mata ki chowki that had come near a mosque seems to have sparked tensions between Muslims in the locality and the predominantly Valmiki Hindus. Be it a drunken brawl, as some reports suggest, deliberate desecration or tensions that had been building up since Eid when some Muslims were asked not to sacrifice animals… it really doesn’t matter.

What matters is how dangerously on the edge a society can be, how easily a neighbour can turn on another with murderous intent, destroying in an instant the years of amity, however fragile, forged through common circumstance. That is what happened in 1984 and that’s what happened now.

The police used drones and found houses that had stocked bricks, bottles and other missiles. In the days of prohibitory orders and curfew that followed, Muslims stayed inside and so did Hindus, staying away from each other and coming out warily to stock up on essentials. The ghettoisation of a neighbourhood, in the works for years perhaps, seemed complete.

Urging the National Commission of Minorities to intervene, a group of lawyers documented police atrocities and said a “disproportionately higher number of Muslims have been arrested and brutally assaulted by the police”.
While Muslim women, particularly in areas where there are fewer Muslim houses, are apprehensive of sexual violence, those Hindus who came forward to help their Muslim neighbours are also vulnerable.
Who is the custodian of their safety? The question still hangs in the air, as it does each time clashes break out, each incident further straining the bonds of a secular, syncretic India.  

The author is consulting editor, dna