Tehelka - The People's Paper
August 27 , 2005
Don’t ask me why it must go on, but it must go on. And I find nothing morbid in it. If I find anything, it’s resilience. The resilience of the hardworking, doggedly honest Sikhs, lowest in the Sikh hierarchy, who were massacred, and the resilience of the brave Sikh women, who held their make-shift refugee homes in alienated zones of stunning loss and fear, relentlessly holding onto their memories and their belief in the Guru Granth Sahib, and the steadfast conviction that one day they too will demand and get justice in this unhappy, unjust democracy.
Many of them have been silenced by the local Mafiosi then controlled by the Congress in Delhi’s Sadar, where Jagdish Tytler called the shots, and in east Delhi and outer Delhi, the bastions of HKL Bhagat, the local politico-don in sinister dark glasses, and Sajjan Kumar, the flamboyant Jat invader, who, with his muscle men and mob power could actually refuse to be raided or arrested. Every news report and independent report, especially the first path-breaking pucl/pudr report Who are the Guilty?, marked their visible and invisible involvement in the organised massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, November, 1984; but they scuttled every move to judge or misjudge them, despite huge protest marches, media coverage, the sense of terrible shame and barbarism which the country experienced. The Big Tree’s incestuous, small seedling, Rajiv Gandhi, was as heartless as his illustrious home minister, the late Narasimha Rao, who also later proudly presided over the Babri Masjid demolition. Bhagat was given the i&b ministry; and let’s not forget Shabana Azmi, with Bhagat presiding over the inauguration of a film festival, as she tore him to pieces when nobody else dared to utter a word.
The entire political establishment chose to block justice: and this followed with the VP Singh regime backed by the bjp and the Left, the HD Deve Gowda regime supported by the Left with the cpi choosing to be inside, and then the bjp-led nda government, which also included the saffron socialists and the Akalis. If the Congress milked the anti-Sikh propaganda to capture the Hindu votes in 1984 (every Sikh taxi driver was a suspect, as their pre-election ads proclaimed — who designed these vicious ads, which ad guru?), the bjp promised instant justice to mobilise Sikh votes — but did not move an inch to provoke the idea of justice.
If the judicial process can so quickly pronounce judgements on Parliament attack case or the Rajiv Gandhi murder case, how come everything becomes so slow when it comes to the massacre of innocents and how come most eyewitnesses turn hostile, as in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat? If this is not Mafia Democracy, what is?
Think about it: 21 years is a long, long time. Perhaps the prime minister, not a stereotyped politician, should reconsider if reforms with a human face have anything to do with such deliberate absence of rehabilitation and justice when it comes to those hit by State-sponsored violence. It’s like shutting the relief camps in Gujarat when 1,00,000 damned people had nowhere to go: surely this is the stuff of poetry which our Great Moderate and Poet, ex-pm Atal Behari Vajpayee, can write about in his retreat near Manali one of those times! But 21 years after, the promise of a new life? It stinks.