Life Among the Scorpions
Page 18
I recommend this report as compulsory reading for those interested in social and economic profiles of victims after a riot or pogrom as this actually was. Apart from listing names, addresses, relatives and losses, they are telling as portraits of distress as it manifested itself in the different strata of Indian society at the time. Trauma is not always a great equalizer, as I discovered. The rich felt they deserved more compensation than the poor. The rich went back to their comfortable lives soon enough. The poor suffer till today.
The poorest were in the rear block of the camp and comprised the core that was rehabilitated later, largely to Tilak Nagar in West Delhi. There were 225 widows; elderly couples, the earning members of whose family had been killed; the badly injured and the burned, whose ages ranged from six months upwards; and women who were pregnant. A pervading hopelessness, and a fervent determination never to go back to Trilokpuri were the dominant emotions.
The refugees in this section consisted of railway coolies, auto-rickshaw drivers, manual labourers and charpai (cot) weavers. We formed a team to collect affidavits about their ordeal from all the refugees at every camp. The ones I received at the Trilokpuri camp were the worst. Some like the ones I provide below still evoke feelings of anger, disgust and despair at the extent of inhumanity I was witnessing for the first time in my life. In most affidavits that contained names of the criminals, names of the victims were withheld.
One was short, but tells the story of another kind of Ram, one who obviously did not imbibe the virtues of the god-like character he played:
On the night of 1st November 10-12 persons came to my house after my husband who was beaten unconscious by the mob. They were armed with swords and lathis and threatened to kill me if I didn’t comply with their wishes. Then all of them preceded to gang-rape me. It was dark so I couldn’t recognise them. But I can identify one person.… He is a sweeper in Alankar Theatre, Lajpat Nagar, New Delhi, who also played the role of Ram in the Ramlila in Trilokpuri this year [sic].
A longer affidavit describes a horror story that was repeated with variations over and over. The stories never failed to stun me:
Trouble started in our Block around 10 am in the morning on 1st November, 1984. Through the day mobs were on the rampage burning and looting the houses of Sikhs and systematically pulling out the male members and burning them on the street. I identified several people in the mob. There was the local leader (also the Pradhan of Block 32) … who was leading the mob and instructing it to kill all the male Sikhs of the locality.
The affidavit mentioned a grocery shopowner from Block 31, a motor mechanic, the ‘dholakwala’, the butcher with his four brothers, and even the ‘dhobi who used to wash … clothes’—as perpetrators of the rampage.
In the evening, the local leader came with his hoodlums (mentioned above) and pulled out our neighbours Badshah Singh and Nanak Singh from their house. They gouged out Nanak Singh’s eyes. They assaulted both of them with sticks and stones. Then they put burning cycle tyres around their necks, laughed and shouted jubilantly as Badshah and Nanak died a slow, agonizing death. I watched all this with my own eyes.
At night this leader and his gang lit bonfires out of the loot in front of our house and stayed there through the night, shouting threats to Sikhs. They were also shouting abuses and obscenities. They asked us to give all the kerosene we had. They were also filling kerosene cans from the depot in Block 26 which was open all day and night to assist the miscreants.
In fact, the morning of Nov 1, the Police was conspicuous by its absence. [A] police constable among them, gave the signal for the mobs to loot, kill and rape and went away, not to return till the next 35-4-hours [sic].
…In the morning of 2nd November, a mob of at least a few hundred people came to my house. Our dhobi [who I have mentioned earlier] told the mobs that ours was a Sikh house. After this my husband was pulled out and attacked with lathis and spears. Burning articles were then thrown on my dying husband. He died in no time…
Heaps of dead people were then burnt in front of my house by the leader and his gang of hoodlums. Even people who were killed in adjoining streets were dragged in front of my house and burnt with torches made of blankets and other inflammable materials….
… The police themselves were amongst the mob, identifying Sikh families and inciting them to kill all of us. Urchins from Block 27 also came, looting and killing people.
I never want to go back to Trilokpuri.
The gang leader who ordered the attacks and the butcher (who used his knives to gouge out eyes), remain in my mind, stuck like dirty tar at the bottom of a shoe. I visited Block 32 some days later since I had seen bail applications being prepared by the hundreds in the outer office of a prominent leader of the ruling party.
Someone led me to the butcher’s front door at the end of the lane. It was chained and padlocked. I was told he had been told to run away to Banaras (or Varanasi).
As for the local gang leader mentioned in the testimony above, he was arrested on 9 November and released on bail five days later.
Victims at the camp told us that that local leader was well protected by ‘netas’ higher up. The police regularly shared the loot collected by these criminals who harboured ill-will towards the Sikhs among them because they worked hard to earn some comforts and did not engage with them in their nefarious activities. The local leaders spoke to us too of their helplessness in the wake of the storm created by the death of their beloved leader. Others even mentioned a hukam (order) to go ahead.
I met one of those accused of leading the mobs in Trilokpuri. He began to lament over his inability to save the people. He even put out a poster asking Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to save these poor victims from blackmail by the police and begging them to return to their home in Trilokpuri!
I heard that a senior Congress leader tried to visit the Farash Bazar camp one day. I could feel the instantaneous hostility and fear, and requested the police to shut the gates. He stood outside awhile and went away. Mother Teresa came too and blessed everyone.
I also noted in the report:
It is remarkable how no personage [from the ruling party] came to show public concern, console the tragic victims, promise them anything, or even wipe their tears for the benefit of Doordarshan as usually happens when there is a flood or drought.
Actually, the Sikhs didn’t want anything more than turbans to hide their cut hair and humiliation. One auto-rickshaw driver told me he had hidden himself in a tin trunk for two days. His neighbours begged him to cut his hair and beard which he did with tears flowing down his face. He told me it was the sixth day he had been unable to look at himself in the mirror. Another scene that I am reminded of when thinking of this Orwellian year is of a dog gnawing at what looked like a mound outside a gutted home. When I asked why it was doing that, I was told that the dog was trying to get at the melted flesh of burnt bodies that was still under the mud.
For many, their tragic stories have still not ended. They feel no sense of closure because the years that followed saw a series of cover-ups, whitewashed reports and callousness by the then ruling party. Each action or inaction has been a slap on the face of each victim. The helplessness continues. As for me—after the victims moved out of the camp, I spent my mornings at the Gujarat Emporium, a few hours at the Janata Party office dealing with relief and rehabilitation work through the People’s Relief Committee that had been set up inside the Jantar Mantar office, and writing and editing a book on the crafts of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh.
With the intellectual opposition I bore towards the Emergency and my experiences during the 1984 saga made me certain that I would openly oppose the Congress on political platforms and dedicate my very untested and minor abilities towards that. It started with ten days in Bangalore helping George Fernandes campaign for the general elections of 1984. What more did I need as a baptism of fire to decide that I would not stand on the sidelines anymore, pretending I was apolitical and unaligned?
*See h
ttps://archive.org/details/AReportFromTheFarashBazarPoliceStationReliefCamp
13
THE EMOTIONAL BECOMES POLITICAL
Towards a Bigger Public Platform
MY RESOLVE TO NOT REMAIN apolitical was final. Indira Gandhi’s declaration of the Emergency, atrocities inflicted on Sikhs in 1984 following her assassination, and my commitment to giving craftspersons in India a platform to exhibit their immense talents, were factors that helped me make up my mind.
When George Fernandes decided to contest the 1984 general elections from Bangalore North, I decided to help him with his political campaign. Sadly, he lost the election to Congress candidate C.K. Jaffer Sharief by a margin of over 40,000 votes. George Sahib took the election results in his stride, as he always did. Victories of any kind evoked a fleeting smile, but his mind would be ticking overtime with plans for work. In defeat, it was the same but without the smile. After the emotionally draining work involving looking after the Sikh victims across Delhi and elsewhere, and the gruelling work put in during the campaign in Bangalore, seeing the huge Congress victory, though in a way expected, intensified my frustration. This was aggravated when I returned to the Sikh relief camp in Trilokpuri to see some of the senior leaders of the ruling party playing angels. My note to George Sahib expressed the misery I keenly felt:
3rd Jan ’85, Delhi
The effect of the early morning visit to the camp has loosened the restriction of the tight band of self control one has been exercising. I kept crying all the way in the car back and even now tears keep filling up in my eyes. [I feel] anger and misery [over the fact] that people like us who believe in ideals, principled battles, lifelong struggles, honesty, hard work should see these rotters brush everything aside and walk in from their comfortable niches.
…You have fought all your life, been through hundreds of adverse mental and physical situations, we talk of building up ideological workers, slogging at it in constituencies—and what happens? … money, media and muscle power and immorality wipes everything aside.
Don’t think I am disheartened or am giving up at all. It’s just the immense and intense indignation of seeing [an undeserving person] walk in. Is the electorate also so ruthless or cowed down or self-seeking that they preferred this?
[The people in the camp are now depending on handouts from those whom they feel had harmed them earlier.] The debasement of the most fundamental human values and dignity is totally galling and unacceptable. Eventually, all that’s left are flickers of individual conscience while the lowest and darkest of actions succeed. Are we so useless?
I know we have faith, we have courage, we have hope, but can’t help privately letting go of some of my pent up anger. We shall never give up—but I hope we have the ability to understand how to direct our strength and desires towards a successful path, “Success” here meaning the rightness of our hopes and visions, achieving the power to make them real, seeing the results of having faith, not having to suffer from seeing things done in vain.
Don’t dwell too much on all that I am writing—and don’t fear that I am losing hope. We all can be disheartened for a few moments before we get a fresh understanding of how to go about our fight, can’t we?
Jaya
George Fernandes was a hard taskmaster and never allowed my emotions to get the better of me. His response to this note a few days later was like that of a kind but brusque schoolmaster.
Your note had me disturbed. True, it brings out your immense humanity and love for the people as well as your concern for the country. But we cannot afford to be overwhelmed with the problems, including the wretchedness of the mind of our people.
I don’t know how much of our history you have read. We are a strange people—a people divided against themselves. 5000 years of built in cruelty and injustice of the caste system is the most important bane of our national existence.
You really need to read a lot more than you have been doing. Books are good companions in more ways than one. But more than anything else they give us the experience of generations compressed in a few sentences.
George
~
Immediately after the Bangalore campaign, George Fernandes went directly to Bombay to consult his doctor. His stiff upper lip extended to his not mentioning a word to us about a painful problem he had been suffering throughout the campaign. It was something to do with his rear end, and he shared it with us colleagues only after making arrangements for surgery at Breach Candy Hospital in Bombay. He had doctors and nurses fussing over him while he underwent considerable pain. My family agreed that I should go for three days to cheer him up as he sounded weak and miserable on the phone. I surprised him by walking into the hospital room and spent three nights sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair beside his bed making jokes and carrying on some irrelevant chatter to take his mind off the pain. He insisted later that the nurses swore he was remarkably better after my visit but was hurt that no one from his immediate family visited him from Delhi. When he wanted me to visit again, I refused, saying my son had exams and I had my weekly bazaar at Hanuman Mandir to run. He was healing and therefore grumbling whenever he telephoned. I suggested that he come to Delhi and stay in bed at his home, and slave-drive his colleagues from a reclining position.
I sent him two notes with a friend, both displaying the quirkiness of our friendship despite my respect and regard for his experience and seniority. One was a poem, the kind I often concocted spontaneously to wake my daughter in the mornings, or help my son remember a part of his homework:
Are you lying like a whale washed up on shore, looking balefully at the world?
Am signing off for the day,
Got to be on my way,
Please don’t sit and sigh,
The days will soon go by,
Many would love to share your fate,
In having fair hands to irrigate,*
Don’t waste your time in empty curses,
Smile and chat to all the nurses.
~
The People’s Relief Committee constituted for relief work on 5 November 1984, was headed by Former Chief Justice of India, M. Hidayatullah, while George Fernandes was its secretary. I was its executive secretary and Chimanbhai Patel, the treasurer. We had collected almost forty lakh rupees from various leaders including chief minister of Andhra Pradesh N.T. Rama Rao and many Sikhs from abroad. Justice (Retd) R.S. Narula and journalist-writer Khushwant Singh were also a part of it and regularly guided us.
The second note to George Fernandes (when he went back to the Bombay hospital for a follow-up), was informally written on the People’s Relief Committee letterhead to report on the Committee’s activities. I adopted a formal tone for the sake of offering some relief in the form of humour during those difficult times.
Dear Sir, I enclose photographs of 21st February of distributing relief at Guru Harkishan Public School. Shri George Mathew and I were the VIPs of the occasion after which we left on a motorbike (not very VIP-ish!). We also had a meeting with Shri Khushwant Singh yesterday regarding various rehabilitation matters, at the end of which Sh. KS gave me a big K-I-S-S for my efforts. Good reward!
Jaya
Our work received publicity abroad although we had no idea how. There were no television channels and none of us wasted time on the media. But the work brought us a clutch of invitations from the UK to attend functions at gurdwaras and Sikh gatherings. They wanted to honour George Sahib and me formally and thank us for all that we had done to save their people in India. We accepted the invitation. In London, we spent some taxing evenings in homes where elderly parents were extremely worried about their sons talking rashly about Khalistan* and wanted us to dissuade them. We did so, challenging point by point their Cockney-accented arguments, over many evenings till they fell silent.
When we returned to India, Rajiv Gandhi began speaking against ‘a former Janata Minister’ who was engaging with the Khalistanis abroad and had addressed extremists in the gurdwaras there. I recall George Fer
nandes’s response in public meetings in Mumbai and even in Balaghat in Madhya Pradesh: ‘Imagine the likes of him talking to me on patriotism while making his wife retain her Italian citizenship for over ten years to have a place to run away to!’ The citizenship issue has been raised by thousands of people including George Fernandes, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and it also features in my writings. This is one issue for which I have not heard a Congressperson provide any answer, let alone a satisfactory one.
He was mighty pleased with Rajiv Gandhi’s repeated public references to his visit to the UK, saying that Rajiv Gandhi had fallen into his trap and become his pracharak (or propagator) now, ensuring coverage and pictures and even some supportive editorials. George Fernandes loved a political fight; in fact, any public challenge. He almost welcomed the idea of going to jail and being beaten up and often wistfully said in his later years that I had learned a lot but he was still waiting for me to be jailed as part of a struggle against injustice. I would retort that these days it doesn’t work that way. People are accused, falsely or otherwise, of money-related crimes and not as a part of their struggle for the sake of national duty or justice. Most are jailed for corruption by their political opponents who happen to be in power at that time. But speaking of jails, a correspondence between George Fernandes and me comes to mind at this point.