|  I ACCUSE...THE ANTI-SIKH VIOLENCE OF 1984
Jarnail Singh
Penguin, 2009,
pp 165, Rs 350
It was Milan Kundera who in his book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting said that a totalitarian state wants its people to be forgetful. But forgetting as horrendous a crime as the anti-Sikh carnage is a crime and a greater crime if one urges to forget it.
Jarnail Singh, who shot to fame for having flung his Reebok runner at the Union Home Minister P Chidambaram — he waxed eloquent on the CBI's clean chit to Congress leader Jagdish Tytler accused as a prime instigator — at a press conference in New Delhi and came to be riled and adored in differing circles though he missed his target, manages to hit his target on the dot this time.
He pores deep into the skulduggery of covering up the truth, in apparent quest of which one government after another set up various committees and commissions — the Marwah Commission, the Mishra Commission, the Kapur Mittal Committee, the Jain Banerjee Committee, the Potti Rosha Committee, the Jain Aggarwal Committee, the Ahuja Committee, the Dhillon Committee, the Narula Committee and the Nanavati Commission — one after the other. It was an instance of a state-sponsored, state-directed and state-supported violence.
There was something crudely comical about the whole exercise because the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 on the streets, roads and bylanes of Delhi still awaits redressal and justice, and rankles the collective memory(26 years down the line). In the intervening years, the ardour for justice has been blunted by the State. Surely the memory has dimmed for those who needed to move on and the call for justice has been made far less strident. Some intractable souls like Nirpreet Kaur whose father Nirmal Singh was burnt alive still grope for justice.
Recalling the charged times of the 1980s, Khuswant Singh in his book, The End of India, rightly notes that "the Bhindranwale chapter in Indian history is a perfect illustration of the disastrous results of not keeping politics separate from religion." The Congress under Indira Gandhi, the then President Zail Singh and the Akali Trinity, consisting of Harchand Singh Longwal, the party leader and 'dictator' of the agitation, Gurugharan Singh Tohra, who controlled the Sikh shrines including the Golden Temple, and Prakash Singh Badal, a former chief minister of Punjab were all responsible for the situation of volatile Punjab to worsen further and Bhindranwale to hold sway for their narrow political ends. To my mind, the cult of hatred must be traced long before Indira Gandhi authorised Operation Blue Star, by doing which, as Inder Malhotra says, "she knew she had also signed her death warrant."
Jarnail and his family barely managed to survive the horror. But his account is replete with accounts of how police, save some gutsy officers like Maxwell Pereira, became complicit in acts of butchery. The army was not deployed, the then President Zail Singh turned out to be a milksop, the then Union Home Minister Narsimha Rao played dud, a role he repeated during his prime ministership during the Gujarat riots, the Doordarshan tried to inflame base passions by pointing out ad nauseam that Indira Gandhi was killed by his two Sikh bodyguards, the print media chose largely to give a sparse coverage to the killings, and the main accused — H K L Bhagat rose to become a cabinet minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government — the list of omissions and commissions is endless.
Unfortunately, there is no writer of Orhan Pamuk's standing in India — recall his gall to remind Turkey of its past riddled with Armenian genocide — to remind us of the sin of our own genocides. And Jarnail Singh is no Raj Kamal Jha either to weave a gut-churning masterpiece like his Fireproof. But he speaks straight from the heart and brings alive the horror so graphically that for three days in November 1984, some parts of Delhi became virtual Mano Majras — a small Indian frontier village in Khuswant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan — with all the killings, flames, raping and pillaging. In effect, Jarnail's tale is one of not only the murder of over 3,000 Sikhs, but also of justice for those who "exist in a twilight of bitterness and despair."
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