A reporter recalls 1984
Indira Gandhi was assassinated on the morning of 31 October 1984 by two Sikh bodyguards, purportedly in revenge for sending the army into the Golden Temple in Amritsar earlier that year to flush out Khalistani terrorists. Recalling the day in his essay “The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi”, novelist Amitav Ghosh, who was then a lecturer at Delhi University, writes: “Certain loyalists in her party had begun inciting the crowds gathered there (AIIMS, where Indira Gandhi was rushed) to seek revenge.” Even as the bus which he boarded at Connaught Place headed towards AIIMS, Mr Ghosh and his fellow travellers remained ignorant of the retribution that had begun: “violence had never been directed at the Sikhs in Delhi.”
Yet, over the next three days, 3,000 Sikhs were murdered in the national capital in one of the worst riots in independent India. Sanjay Suri, who was then a crime reporter with The Indian Express, recounts his experience of covering the orgy of violence in 1984: The Anti-Sikh Violence and After. The book is, however, not only a gritty memoir; it transcends the limits of its genre to become a passionate plea for justice. In the “Author’s Note”, Mr Suri says that he was prompted to write this book by his colleague Sagarika Ghose’s pertinent question: “Why haven’t you written a book on 1984 yet?” The distance in time has allowed him to contextualise his experience through interviews of people whose lives were caught up in the incidents one way or the other, through analysis of various investigations, completed or aborted, and through an advocacy of what can yet be done to deliver justice.
The analysis, however, does not dilute the story. The book begins like a hardboiled thriller with an anonymous telephonic tip-off to a young crime reporter (Mr Suri) about a politician trying to get his men, accused of looting Sikhs, freed from a police station. Following it up, he finds then Congress MP Dharam Dass Shastri bearing down upon Karol Bagh police station house officer Ranbir Singh to release his men. In a bizarre twist, the bull-in-a-china-shop politician is supported by then additional commissioner of police Hukum Chand Jatav. The Orwellian nature of this situation become evident minutes later when Mr Suri asks Mr Jatav to explain his conduct only to be told: “No such thing happened... you have not seen it.”
Denial of the truth and discrediting eye witnesses become the effective tools of cover-up. While deposing before the Justice Ranganath Misra commission in 1985, Mr Suri is asked by lawyers – appointed by the central government and Delhi police – to present an “independent witness” to corroborate his claim of being present at Rakab Ganj to witness an attack on a gurudwara there. He realises his book cannot be treated as academic history; nor does he intend it to be: “...the account is not historical also because it adds up to a case for steps that are still possible to take.”
The case that he makes is that the killing and looting on the streets of Delhi took place not only through an administrative failure but with active participation and premeditation of the administration, then Congress (I) government and the police. Right before the Lok Sabha elections last year, Congress Vice-President (and grandson of Indira Gandhi) Rahul Gandhi claimed that the administration, led by his father and then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, had tried to stop the riots. Mr Suri refutes this claim. The stories he reports are startling as they illustrate by contrast how effective policing could have prevented the bloodshed. For instance, Maxwell Pereira, who had managed to save the historic Sis Ganj gurudwara with only a small band of policemen by firing one shot into a riotous crowd; Amod Kanth, who fearing a “civil war” prepared well in advance to prevent the worst; and finally, Ved Marwah, a former additional commissioner of Delhi police, whose inquiry into the role of security forces was summarily aborted.
The Marwah inquiry, Mr Suri, claims could have nailed those in the police who failed in their duty or aided the killers. Senior advocate H S Phoolka, who has fought for decades to help the riot victims, reports in When A Tree Shook Delhi (co-authored with Manoj Mitta), how the police were busy doctoring evidence to absolve them: Soor Veer Singh Tyagi, station house officer of Kalyanipuri, which had jurisdiction over Trilokpuri, one of the worst affected districts during the riots, told Mr Phoolka during a sting operation how he had been suspended as he had failed to dispose of the bodies in his area effectively. Mr Suri reports how during a visit, along with colleagues, to Trilokpuri, their car was attacked by a gang of criminals, who were waiting for journalists to withdraw to resume the killing.
Thirty-eight journalists have been killed across the world till July this year, according to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The figure is alarming; it is already more than half the total last year: 61. These figures, however, do not reveal the other harm scribes reporting crime and conflict often encounter — the emotional trauma. In The Bang Bang Club, photojournalists Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, recount the emotional stress of the job. Their colleague Kevin Carter committed suicide, sinking into a depression after taking the iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of an emaciated girl being stalked by a vulture in famine-affected Sudan. Mr Suri, too, encounters a similar emotional crisis on visiting the Tilak Vihar colony in west Delhi, now home to many of the riot victims and their descendants. He seeks catharsis in pleading the case for justice, which one hopes will come their way, even though it is too late.
1984 The Anti-Sikh Violence and After Sanjay Suri HarperCollins Publisher 272 pages; ~499