On the spot
Tavleen Singh
Normally On the day that a Delhi court decided last week that Congress leader, Sajjan Kumar, was not guilty of involvement in the organized killing of Sikhs in 1984 I had an accidental encounter that became an epiphany in more ways than one. It was a day filled with hectic political activity. The Supreme Court pulled up the director of the CBI (Central Bureau of Intelligence) for sharing his report on the coal scandal with the Law Minister. The government’s top law officers fought with each other and one of them resigned on the grounds that he was being made a scapegoat. And, then late in the afternoon came the news that Sajjan Kumar had been found not guilty of murder and inciting a mob to violence even if his five co-defendants had. There was so much going on that Barkha did a special show and I was invited to be a panelist.
Having covered the pogroms in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and because I continue to remember them with horror and shame I always accept any chance to talk about what happened. I consider it my duty to do this in the hope that justice will be done one day even if thirty years have passed without someone like Jagdish Kaur finding closure. She was on the panel with me and when she was asked by Barkha to describe what she felt about Sajjan Kumar being acquitted she said she felt ‘broken inside’. She then went on to ask why the judge should have found it in him to free the leader of the mob that killed her husband, young son and three relatives while finding his co-defendants guilty. ‘They were just obeying his instructions,’ she said ‘he was the leader. I saw him with my own eyes and with my own ears heard him say there should be not a single Sikh left alive. And, if there are Hindu homes that are giving them shelter burn them down as well.’ It was heart-rending to hear her words and they brought back memories of those terrible three days in which the streets of Delhi became killing fields.
The eminent lawyer, H.S. Phoolka, was part of Barkha’s panel and explained that the reason why Sajjan Kumar had got away with murder was because the police had chosen to make a weak case against him. Naresh Gujral, who organized vigilante squads in his neighbourhood to protect Sikhs fleeing the death squads, was also on the panel and what we should have spent our time talking about was why it had taken thirty years for justice to begin to be done in one of the most shameful crimes in Indian history. But, Barkha had reckoned without Mani Shankar Aiyer’s ability to distract attention from a shadow of blame falling on his late leader, Rajiv Gandhi.
He chose to do this by launching an ugly personal attack on me. A propos of nothing he said ‘you sucked up to me for six months’. Sucking up has been his outstanding forte ever since he came into politics and is famously not mine so I have no idea what he meant by this. But, he then proceeded to talk about how I had written ‘a filthy book after going to dinner parties’. I know what he meant by this. In ‘Durbar’ he does not emerge as a hero so much as a sniveling sycophant so he cannot have been happy with the book. And, what would have distressed him even more is that I write about dinner parties at which I met Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. The courtiers who surround Sonia have taken particular exception to this.
If Mani Shankar had read ‘Durbar’ more carefully he would have discovered that I describe the massacres in Delhi in considerable detail and this may perhaps have made him realize that he was showing sickening contempt for Jagdish Kaur’s pain. But, even as I write these words I know that the courtiers who encircle the Gandhi dynasty singularly lack compassion. They are also incapable of finding fault with anything that the dynasty does so Mani Shankar tried to whitewash Rajiv Gandhi’s role in the massacres by saying that he had reacted promptly to stop the violence. This caused Naresh Gujral to say angrily that this was not true. People like Inder Gujral and Chandrashekhar, he said, had pleaded with the prime minister to call the army out if he could not control the situation and he had done nothing for three days. At the end of these three days more than 3000 Sikhs had been killed in Delhi alone.
Since then what has been done in the name of justice has been a travesty. In thirty years of inquiry commissions and court cases all that has happened is that the Congress Party has gone out of its way to make sure that none of its senior leaders were implicated. The police has played an active role in helping this happen because otherwise the searchlight would turn on them and reveal thousands of cases, like that of Jagdish Kaur, when they refused to register an FIR. They told her, she said, that many more Sikhs needed to die so they could register a case together.
So what was my epiphany? Firstly, realization that Mani Shankar Aiyar has no right to be in public life because of his total lack of compassion. And, then the realization that the Congress Party was only bluffing when its senior leaders, Dr. Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, apologized, twenty-five years after the massacres, for what happened to the Sikhs in 1984. If they had meant their apology sincerely would they have allowed a senior Congress leader, and a close aide of Rajiv Gandhi, to go on national television and mock the terrible grief of one of the victims of the violence? Would they have allowed him to tell a widow who saw her husband and son being burned alive to ‘carry on fighting for justice’ even if takes another thirty years? Would they have allowed him to talk sneeringly about ‘kangaroo court’ justice when there cannot be a better example of distorted justice than what has happened to the victims of the Sikh pogroms? Would they have allowed Sajjan Kumar to contest elections on a Congress ticket after 1984? I left Barkha’s show that evening without being able to find a single comforting word to say to Jagdish Kaur.
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