‘Tales from the time still haunt us’

Rajbir Singh was only 11 months old but he knows minute details of how his father was burnt alive. He knows that mobs roamed the streets chanting, ‘kill children of snakes’

NEW DELHI: Rajbir Singh has no memories of his father and grandfather, except stories that have been passed on to him by his family.

One of the stories — about their deaths, is violent and gory but that is the one etched in his memory.

Rajbir was told that he was 11 months old in 1984, when a mob burnt his grandfather Kirpal Singh alive on the handdrawn cart he used to hawk peanuts for a living.

When his disabled grandmother limped out to pull the body, lying in a heap of other bodies, the mob pushed her away. Then they dumped the bodies on a truck.

“Aaj bhi rongte khade ho jaate hain un kahaniyon se. (The hair-raising stories evoke horror even today),” says Rajbir, now 33, as he recalls the gruesome stories from the days when violence against Sikhs swept through Delhi and other parts of the country after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.

“Log bacchon ko raja-rani ki kahani sunate hain, humein yeh sab kahaniyan sunayi jati thi. (People tell stories of kings and queens to their children but we were told these stories),” he adds.

He was given detailed accounts of how his father, Modhu Singh, was the next to be killed. The mob — armed with iron rods, petrol cans and wooden sticks — entered the house and dragged out his father.

They doused him with petrol and burnt him alive.

Rajbir’s terrified mother dressed Rajbir and his elder brother in his sister’s clothes to save them. He recalls his grandmother telling him the chilling slogan used by the mob during the attack — “Saanp toh maar diye, saanpolon ko bhi