‘Crime
against Humanity’: Remembering the 1984 Anti Sikh Carnage through the Pages Stained with Blood by Indira
Goswami
Prosenjit Ghosh
Assistant Teacher
Malgaon Malitola F.P. School
Uttar Dinajpur, West Bengal, India
Abstract
Human civilisation is clouded with incidents and
occurrences since its beginning and the historians played the major part in
recording the episodes for the future generations to know. But the litterateurs
or fictioneers act as the ‘cultural historians’ and try to document the times
in almost approximate realities lest we forget what had been experienced by the
common people of a particular period. Thus fiction becomes the consequential
interpretation of history. The social injustices, exploitations, and sufferings
find vivid expressions in their writings. But perhaps we do not learn from
history so it always repeats itself. The assassination of former Indian Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 shook the country and as a backwash at once brought
the communal riot, ethnic violence, and social unrest nationwide and
particularly in the city of Delhi. The present paper attempts to look back at
the inhuman cruelties and atrocities perpetrated upon the Sikh community
residing in Delhi following the regicide of Mrs. Gandhi as witnessed and
depicted in Indira Goswami’s novel Pages Stained with Blood.
Key words:
Blue Star, Indira
Gandhi, Assasination, Delhi, Anti-Sikh, Riot, Communal Violence, Eyewitness,
Indira Goswami
There is a history
in all men's lives
Figuring the
natures of the times deceased;
(Shakespeare, 2H4.
3.1. 1498-1499)
Literature has been serving the purpose of a mirror to
the society since its inception and litterateurs thus work as the cultural
historians to document the contextual eras with approximate actuality. The
characters in a work of (historical) fiction transport us back to the time and
make us stand in the milieu that the writers document in their works. Thus
history takes the centre stage of the narrative. The truth which the writers
behold around them flying, catch hold of and put it into the frame of writing.
The instantaneous
constitution of the Indian Military action named ‘Operation Blue Star’ at the
holiest Gurudwara Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in Amritsar, Punjab was
followed by the assassination of the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
by her Sikh bodyguards which eventually led to the sanguineous Sikh pogrom
nationwide in the year 1984. Government reported that about 3,350 Sikhs were
killed in general and 2,800 were particularly in the city of Delhi whilst
independent sources estimated the death toll at about 8,000–17,000. There are sufficient consequential corroborations which
prove that the riots were pushed, aided and abetted by some members of the contemporary
Indian Government and the Congress party leaders who led groups of rioters
shouting khoon ka badla khoon (blood for blood). The Delhi police were reported
to have been passive onlookers as the rioters shamelessly slaughtered the
Sikhs. Actually the massacres were so organised and regular that without the
active backing and help of influential and powerful persons, such swift
slaughtering could not have been possible. Amitav Ghosh has remembered the time
in one of his writings:
We were confident that the
government would soon act to stop the violence. In India, there is a drill
associated with civil disturbances: a curfew is declared; paramilitary units
are deployed; in extreme cases the army marches to the stricken areas … But in
New Delhi – and much of North India – hours followed without a response. Every
few minutes we turned to the radio, hoping to hear that the Army had been
ordered out. All we heard was mournful music and descriptions of Mrs. Gandhi’s
lying in state; of coming and goings of dignitaries, foreign and national.
(Ghosh)
Later Mrs. Gandhi’s son Rajiv Gandhi, who eventually
became the next Prime Minister, went as far as to justify the genocide by
saying that when a big tree falls, the earth shakes. The CBI concluded that the
riots were the part of a well executed conspiracy. Like any other significant
historical event, the 1984 Sikh pogrom has also been the subject of several
creations of art and literature. Literary works like Pages Stained with Blood
by Indira Goswami, Tragedy of Punjab: Operation Bluestar & After by
Khushwant Singh and Kuldip Nayar, Helium by Jaspreet Singh, When a Tree Shook
Delhi by H. S. Phoolka etc. depict and describe the events and incidents
surrounding the riots.
Mamoni Raisom Goswami, widely known as Indira Goswami
(1942- 2011), has been one of the India’s most distinguished authors whose
writings have defined our contemporary world. An awardee of the most
prestigious Sahitya Akademi (1983) and the Jnanpith Award (2001), Goswami originally
hailed from the India’s northeast corner state of Assam. Her passion and
integrity in writing brought her worldwide acclamation and many of her works
have been translated into English and other languages from her native Assamese.
She had written about the plights and oppressed lives of the marginalised and
peripheral sections of the society and people’s insensitivity towards them. Her
writing is like a stifled cry of pain at man's inhumanity to man, which
modulates sometimes into quiet bitterness and at times into poignant pathos
(Gohain 140). She is indeed, to quote Amrita Pritam, one of those rare souls who have been able to get an insight into the
great power which is working behind this universe.
Indira Goswami’s Assamese
novel Tej Aru Dhulire Dhushorito Prishtha was first published in a literary
journal Goriyoshi in episodic form in the year 1994. The novel, later
translated into English under the title Pages Stained with Blood (2001),
depicts the bloodied Sikh slaughter of 1984 occurred in the city of Delhi with
stark detailing. It is written as (a narration of) a diary of an anonymous
Assamese female writer who taught at the Delhi University and lived in a small
flat at Shakti Nagar. The writer- narrator is often identified as Goswami
herself who was also a teacher at Delhi University at that time. Moreover she
herself in an interview clarified her novel of being written in first person
as:
That’s because I wrote exactly what I
saw and most of it is true. It was so horrible and shocking that I couldn’t
exaggerate anything further. The novel is more of a documentation of what I saw
… There is almost no difference between fact and fiction in that book … as I
followed the papers in the following days, not much was written on the victims.
A lot of facts and a lot of stories never reached the papers. People never got
to know all the stories. You can’t imagine how brutal they are… (Goswami)
The unnamed narrator of the novel actually wanted to
write a splendiferous book on the majestic history of Delhi and she was thus
always ardent to any information available from pages, places and people. She
visited many localities to punctiliously know Delhi and took down everything
worth she came across. But the abrupt functioning of the ‘Operation Blue Star’
in the month of June and the subsequent homicide of Indira Gandhi on October 31
in the year 1984 brought sudden change to the plot of the book and her writing
dived impetuously into the catastrophic calamity perpetrated against the Sikhs
particularly in Delhi. At the end her diary fell into the pool of blood of the
innocent victims and the pages got stained with it. Thus she lost all her
recorded particulars and her long cherished dream to write a book on the
historical city of Delhi remained unexecuted and finally what she ended up
writing was a painful memoir of the holocaust.
The Sikh community is known for their bravery
and generosity. This particular community has been subjected to violence and
atrocity since aeons. The narrator represented her immediate Sikh milieu
through the characters she had been acquainted and befriended with while living
in Shakti Nagar. The Sikh people who had been the integral part of her everyday
life were Santokh Singh Ajnabi, Balbir Singh, and Nanak Singh Bhalla alias Sikh
Baba. Santokh Singh was a handsome auto rickshaw driver who drove the narrator
anywhere she wanted to go, be it to the university or through the by-lanes of
old Delhi to collect materials for her dream project. Not only so but he also
fostered a strong feeling of secret love for her which the latter was well
aware of. The narrator also honestly confessed her mutual admiration for him
secretly in her diary:
He turns to look at me as I sit on the rear seat. It
could have been the gaze of Mahiwal for Sohni, of Farhad for Shireen, or
Pahtab’s famous lover Punnu for Shashi. I feel a kind of sexual desire surging
up inside. Ashamed, I restrain it immediately. (Goswami 16)
Balbir Singh was a kabadiwala who used to come every
Saturday and Sunday mornings, to buy old newspapers and books by the kilo, as
kabadi (13). He was also an ardent reader of the good and valuable books he
bought as rubbish and performed his role as the raconteur of the tales about
old Delhi to the protagonist:
Bibiji, you take out your notebook. My day’s work is
over. I’ll tell you the story of Chandni Chowk … from the account of Chatursen…
I run inside to get my notebook. (18)
Their closeness was so strong that Balbir didn’t even
think twice to keep his two wooden boxes full of money to the narrator as the
safest custody.
The lonely Sikh Baba was a refugee of 1947
from the village of Dera Ismail, Pakistan. The narrator used to see him
standing like a statue almost always in front of her housing near the gol
chakkar. He always remained silent and seldom murmured something as a reply to
the narrator’s greetings. Later she was stunned to know the reason for Baba’s
silence from Balbir:
‘The Baba dealt in spices and dry fruit … When he left
Pakistan … in 1947 … At a certain check post … his daughter Kuldip Kaur
vanished … Kuldip’s dead body was found a week later in a wheat field ... He
was taken to the field to identify the body. She had no clothes on. Her breasts
had been cut off and hung on a peepal tree … Baba has not spoken since that
day.’ (24 -25)
Thus Goswami has depicted the gruesome picture of
violence perpetrated particularly against the (Sikh) women at the time of
British India’s partition. Besides these three important people in the
narrator’s life, there were also other Sikhs like Brigadier Ratan Man Singh and
her personal physician Dr. Monga whom she also shared good friendship with and
mainly due to these immediate relationships the victimisation of the Sikhs in
1984 carnage drastically distressed her. With the starting of the ‘Operation
Blue Star’ in Punjab, the situation in Delhi began to get worsened steadily:
It is impossible to go through the newspapers. They reek
of blood and gunfire. They are filled with snapshots of … dismembered limbs,
ugly pictures. The genteel ambience of Delhi seems to be disappearing into some
dark cavern. (47)
There were aggressive checkouts on the Sikhs. The police
were on prowl and Sikhs under stringent superintendence. Many innocent Sikhs
left Delhi out of fear of the police. The narrator saw anxiety on the faces of
the Sikhs when she visited the Seeshganj Gurudwara where, she remembered, the
ninth Sikh Guru Teg Bahadur was publicly decapitated by the Mughal emperor
Aurangzeb. The words on the walls of the Jama Masjid, the University and Delhi
Gate draw a clear picture of these times (101). Finally the holiest Akhal Takht
being destroyed, great dissatisfaction permeated among the Sikhs:
The shadow
of the Golden Temple loomed large over Delhi. The police used tear gas to
disperse a violent crowd near the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara … Most Sikhs had
closed their shops in Delhi and the neighbouring areas in protest … Killing and
marauding! For a whole week, my notebook recorded tales of death and killing
alone. (110)
The narrator described that in the localities like Nagia
Park all the Sikh shops be it small or reputed had downed their shutters. Even
Dr. Monga’s clinic was also closed. Some Sikh taxi drivers sat huddled silently
as if struck by lightning. The bullets fired at the Golden Temple pierced every
Sikh heart as much so that a Sikh professor even gave his resignation from the
University. In the mean time some misunderstandings had created a communication
gap between the narrator and Santokh Singh but amidst such calamitous hour she
grew anxious of his present whereabouts and when he suddenly knocked her door
she felt somewhat relieved to see him:
‘Look
Santokh Singh … three Sikhs- you, Balbir Singh, and the Sikh Baba have somehow
become a part of my family. I feel really sorry and can understand your
feelings, especially since the Akal Takht has been destroyed.’ (113)
Being offered a cup of tea Santokh Singh despairingly
negated her:
‘…
No one offers a Sikh three-wheeler driver a chair or asks him for tea … we do
not even get water to drink, unless we ask for it with folded hands. Things
have become worse now…’
…
‘These
days, commuters avoid three-wheelers driven by Sikhs. They suspect us. My
vehicle came empty from Minto Bridge.’ (114)
At last came the ultimate response to the seething
resentment for the ‘Operation Blue Star’ and India witnessed one of the fateful
events in history since her independence:
Then
suddenly, I hear an outcry from below, ‘They’ve killed Indira Gandhi!’
…
‘Indira
Gandhi murdered?’ (130)
The very next moment everything seemed to be
standstill. The narrator without any delay started for her flat from the
University and she found the main road empty. There was so much silence all
around that it appeared ominous and disturbing. Actually the silence was
nothing but the calm before the storm. Soon the unfortunate assassination of
Mrs. Gandhi let loose the horror of carnage and massacre of the innocent Sikhs
all over the city of Delhi. As the narrator reached near the bus stop:
…
suddenly a turban rolls onto the road. Someone pushes a Sikh gentleman out of
the bus, making him trip and fall near the footpath …
One
passenger … starts shouting ‘Police, Police!’ There is no response from the
police post … I see two more turbans on the road at the Shakti Nagar crossing
and stains of blood … All the Sikh drivers are gone. (131-132)
The narrator’s human heart cried for the unknown fate of
Santokh Singh, Balbir, and Sikh Baba as she grew fearful for them. She
witnessed from her balcony a political leader yelling in front of a group of
people:
‘Dead
bodies are lying in your houses. Has your blood turned white? Why don’t you do
something …?’ (133)
And the next moment she saw that the people had set a
Sikh man aflame who had come cycling by. She heard the bursting sounds of the
skull going up in blazes and a harrowing shriek tearing up the sky. She again
noticed the political leader inciting a new group of people and soon
We
can see flames rising from the Anand Parbat Punjabi Basti … the slum nearby,
but occasionally we hear a few heart-rending cries. There’s also the occasional
cruel shout of triumph.
Thud,
thud, thud!
Finish
them, Kill them all!
We
hear anguished cries.
Wahe
Guru! Wahe Guru! (135)
Indira Goswami was a humanist writer. Amitav Ghosh once
said that she is one of those rare figures whose achievements as a writer are
closely paralleled by their accomplishments as a social and political activist.
She always tried to find the silver lining among the darkest clouds. In Pages
Stained with Blood also, she depicted a few characters like Madan Bhaisahab,
the landlord of the narrator, who did not forget his foremost duty as a human
in the time of crisis. His character reminds us to offer our hands of help to
the fellow human beings in times of need which we often fail to do. He,
jeopardizing his own life, saved some badly injured Sikh taxi drivers caught in
the hysteria of bloody mayhem from the Nagia Park and brought them to his
house. The narrator saw their turbans were torn and clothes were reduced to
rags. The malicious mischief makers sensing the wounded Sikhs’ presence inside
the room threw bricks and stones from outside and shouted:
‘Khoon
ka badla khoon se …’
‘…
Indira Gandhi Zindabad.’
‘Bring
out the traitors …’ (138)
The
unyielding Madan Bhaisahab tackled the hooligans and drove them away. Shortly
after the narrator heard huge explosions nearby and easily guessed that Dr.
Monga’s hospital has been reduced to rubble which he built with great care and
sacrifice. After the first aid, Madan Bhaisahab took the injured Sikhs to the
hospital with the help of his two Nepali chowkidars. The narrator took a bucket
of water and a mop to clean the blood flooded floor and found her notebook had
fallen from the table and was soused in blood. But she felt that in times of
such crisis, people rise to their full potential and regain courage and will
(140). The next morning she came onto the road and saw a heap of long hair and
beard, wrenched from the heads and faces of the Sikhs, a half burnt human jaw
and a lump of human flesh (141). There continued the plundering and sharing of
the loot among the people openly in public without any policeman or the army
nearby. The ‘dance of death’ continues for three days without any intervention
of the Government or the administration. The narrator recorded:
From
Block No 32 of the Resettlement Colony at Trilokpuri, four truckloads of
skulls, bones and ashes have been brought out. Soon after, fifteen more bodies
are discovered.
The
corpses of Sikhs fill the mortuary at Tees Hazari. Ultimately, they have had to
be heaped on the road, blocking the footpaths … some twenty four Sikhs have
tyres put round their necks and are burnt to death in broad daylight. (143-144)
She saw corpses were lying about in roads and gutters,
smouldering trucks at a few steps away from her apartment. When later she stood
in front of the local Gurudwara she tearfully beheld that the gurudwara has
been reduced to ashes. The granthi pierced with a trident and the half burnt
copy of the Granth Sahib lies in a corner (145). The vivid descriptions of the
mayhem throughout the pages show the extremity of the carnage Delhi witnessed
at that time. Amidst the havoc the narrator’s mind grew more anxious for Balbir
Singh and Santokh Singh as the two have been radically vanished beyond any
trace. After eleven days of the royal assassination the narrator took the
wooden boxes of Balbir and headed toward the relief camps with a kindling hope
to find them there. On the way she stopped at Jahangirpuri to find one of her
Sikh acquaintances whose son had been the riot victim. There she surprisingly
discovered that though all the houses in that block were destroyed, the house
of the local MLA stands amidst the charred and blackened remains like a white
crow in the middle of a flock of black crows (148). She also saw two such
houses where every member had got slaughtered. Then she left for the relief
camps but did not find her friends there amidst the wailing crowds of the
widows, children and the riot survivors. After two days the narrator came to
the Ludlow Castle Relief Camp and fortunately found the wife and son of Balbir
there from whom she came to know that he had been missing since the riot. But
when she handed over the two boxes to his wife, the latter refused to take them
as she was unaware of it. The narrator wanted to confirm her position by
pointing towards Balbir’s sleeping son Sonnu who had been to her house many
times with his father. But the very next moment she cried out in disbelief as
she saw that both of Sonnu’s eyes are bandaged … His eyes were pierced with a
sword (152). The narrator silently returned to her house. Some days later one
morning she ran to her balcony hearing a racket outside and found out that
‘There’s a dead body. At the gol chakkar. It’s a horrible sight. It’s been cut
into pieces with a sword’ (155). No sooner had she gone down with an
apprehensive mind than suddenly a yell pierces my heart like a trident. ‘This
is the corpse of Santokh Singh’ (156). After some days the narrator came across
a ‘black book’ that contained the names and addresses of leaders, bosses,
merchants, goondas and butchers, who were responsible for the carnage, but very
surprisingly in no time the book was seized from bookshops … and then it
disappeared altogether (158). Having witnessed such havoc being wrecked on the
innocent people, the narrator became distressed to such an extent that nothing
could motivate her to stay in Delhi any longer and she left
…
for Guwahati on 20 November, 1984, my desire to write the book on Delhi,
painting in broad swaths of colour the days and lives of the Moghuls and the
British Raj, remaining unfulfilled and the two wooden boxes of Balbir still
with me, a small, steady hope in a corner of my heart – maybe he still will
come back one day. (8)
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia
director at Human Rights Watch, once said that India’s failure to prosecute
those most responsible for the anti-Sikh violence in 1984 has not only denied
justice to Sikhs, but has made all Indians more vulnerable to communal
violence. The authorities repeatedly blocked investigations to protect the
perpetrators of atrocities against Sikhs, deepening public distrust in India’s
justice system. Indeed, even after more than three decades,
the carnage survivors have yet to receive any semblance of justice. Most of the
criminals are yet to be charged and many of the riot stricken families continue
to live in impoverishment and disenfranchisement till date.
Through the last seven decades since freedom we have
sailed lakhs of nautical miles past. Still the departure from disintegration
has not yet been set out. Communal riots till date dilapidate the roofs of
millions and squash their lives under its heavy wheels. Even the nugatory
incitement reddens the sky of communal amity. Smoke billows out dimming the
indigo welkin. Whose flag of conquest is hoisted in this battle, that lies in
the dark domain but humanity ceases to breath because of its pervasive toxicity.
Indira Goswami’s novel Pages Stained with Blood keeps reminding us to
scrutinize our morality time and again lest it lampoons us of being the best
yet fabricated creation of nature.
Works Cited
Goswami,
Indira. Pages Stained with Blood. 2nd
ed. Trans. Pradip Acharya. Katha, 2016.
Ghosh,
Amitav. “The ghosts of Mrs Gandhi: Amitav Ghosh looks back at the 1984 massacre
of Sikhs.” Scroll.in. 20 Dec. 2018, scroll.in/article/906350/the-ghosts-of-mrs-gandhi-amitav-ghosh-looks-back-at-the-1984-massacre-of-sikhs.
Gohain, Hiren. “Ineffable Mystery.” Indian Literature, vol. 33, no.1, 1990, pp. 139-145. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23339149.
Goswami, Indira. “Stained with Blood: An Interview with Indira Goswami.”
Interview by Aruni Kashyap. PRATILIPI: A
Bilingual Literary Journal, Freedom Special, no. 13, N.d., pratilipi.in/2009/03/02/stained-with-blood-an-interview-with-indira-goswami/
“India:
No Justice for 1984 Anti- Sikh Bloodshed.” Human
Rights Watch. 29 Oct. 2014, www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/29/india-no-justice-1984-anti-sikh-bloodshed
“When a big tree falls, the earth shakes: How Rajiv Gandhi justified
1984 anti- Sikh riots.” DNA. 17 Dec.
2018, www.dnaindia.com/india/report-when-a-big-tree-falls-the-earth-shakes-how-rajiv-gandhi-justified-1984-anti-sikh-riots-2697259
Web Links:
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mamoni_Raisom_Goswami&oldid=946969353
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Operation_Blue_Star&oldid=951761610
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pages_Stained_with_Blood&oldid=927968646
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1984_anti-Sikh_riots&oldid=950601460
internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/2H4_M/scene/3.1/
www.arunikashyap.com/the-bronze-sword-of-thengphakhri-tehsildar-by-indira-goswami