The best coverage I have seen on this topic comes from the Human Rights in India Blog, run by the Human Rights organization Ensaaf. Ensaaf has done some truly excellent work on the Delhi 1984 Pogroms. Here they compare the Nanavati Commission report to their own investigation of the subject:
The report fails in similar ways as the Misra Commission report. In its report, Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India, ENSAAF analyzes thousands of pages of previously unavailable affidavits, government records and arguments submitted to the 1985 Misra Commission, established to examine the Sikh Massacres in Delhi, Kanpur, and Bokaro. The report reveals the systematic and organized manner in which state institutions, such as the Delhi Police, and Congress (I) officials perpetrated mass murder in November 1984 and later justified the violence in inquiry proceedings.
… police officers not only passively observed the violence, but also actively participated in the attacks and made promises of impunity to assailants. Senior officers: ordered their subordinates to ignore attacks against Sikhs; ordered policemen to disarm Sikhs to increase their vulnerability to attack; systematically disabled and neutralized any officers who attempted to deviate from the norm of police inaction and instigation; released culprits; and manipulated police records in order to destroy the paper trail of the violence and protect criminals from the possibility of effective future prosecutions. At all times, the police and their superiors had sufficient force and knowledge to effectively counter the violence.
ENSAAF’s report further demonstrates the involvement of the Congress Party in organizing the massacres. Senior political leaders provided for details such as deployment of mobs, weapons and kerosene, as well as for the larger support and participation of the police. They conducted meetings the night before the onslaught of the massacres where they distributed weapons, money, voter and ration lists identifying Sikhs and their properties, and in inflammatory speeches, instructed attendees to kill Sikhs.
Grave lapses in police investigations, delays in filing cases, the failure to identify and investigate prosecution witnesses, the deliberate misrecording of witness statements, and the failure to comply with legal procedures precluded effective prosecutions against major perpetrators.Over the last 20 years, prior to the Nanavati commission, a commission of inquiry and eight committees have been set up to investigate the pogroms. Officially, 2,733 people were killed but only a handful of people have been convicted.
You can read their report on-line. It is a travesty that politicians with blood on their hands are such central actors in the current government.
KPS Gill was most certainly not a Yahya, and Indian army did not rape, plunder, pillage and kill in Punjab like the genocide in East Bengal
So what ? What does thar prove ?
Mujahidbhai, this was not a red herring : I was only trying to provide evidence to argue against Gujjudude’s assertion that “(Indian) central government went after the minorities”. I drew attention to Yahya to show what a government going after minorties would be capable of stooping down to what level of butchery, and what its consequences would be. indian government did not go after Sikhs, otherwise it would have lost Punjab just as Pakistan lost Bangladesh. It is certainly not my intention to fall for the good old two-wrongs-make-a-right fallacy, and I would most certainly agree with you that KPS Gill as an officer of a secular democratic country like India must be held to much higher standards than a tin-pot blood-thirsty dictator in an avowed Islamic country.
So let us see the context in which KPS Gill operated. There never has been or is a systemic persecution of Sikhs in India per se, but it is indeed true that many innocent Sikhs were caught in the crossfire between militants and KPS Gill. However, KPS Gill was just a tough cop doing his job to defend Punjab from the proxy war unleashed by Islamo-fundie Zia, and his fanatical hatchet man Hamid Gul. Indian government had no motive to after a successfful and patriotic model minority but unfortunately being tough against militants was just the price India had to pay thanks to Pakistan’s relentless pursuit of a strategy to create hatred between Sikhs and Hindus. Even today, top militants like Wadhawan Singh Babbar, Gajinder Singh, Paramjit Singh Panjwar and so on continue to live and operate in Pakistan. This made it extremely difficult for Indian government to contain the militancy in Punjab through regular institutions and police work. It was an incredibly grave threat to the very existence of India : there were plane hijackings, mass murders of Hindus, and assassinations, including killings of democratically elected politicians like Lalit Maken or even army officers like General Vaidya. At that point, what else was India expected to do? After all, what good would human rights serve if India had lost in Punjab to create yet another theocratic state and unleashed another religious holocaust like that in Bangladesh? Unfortunately, trampling upon the human rights of a few thousand Sikhs was the lesser evil that saved Punjab, and more importantly, saved millions of Hindu and Sikh lives by preventing the creation of Khalistan. That is the higher standard that I choose to use to judge KPS Gill.
Indians need to thank KPS Gill to have defeated the first proxy war from Pakistan that came closest to success, and I wish the Indian government had enough gumption to have him do the same in Kashmir as well. Eighties was the time that Indian economy was completey destroyed by years of Nehruvian-Stalinist policies while Pakistan was flush with arms and money from Uncle Sam for being its lackey in the Afghan war. In this context, KPS Gill’s excesses are the bitter pill that India had to swallow in order to ensure its survival. Those who abuse the freedoms and institutions of a free society to challenge its very foundations must be defeated, no matter how high the price may be. Shedding the blood of innocent citizens is the unfortunate price that countries like India are forced to pay because they are too civilized to nuke those tinpot dictators delusional with fantasies of destroying India to reclaim their place to the Mughal thronw by carrying out proxy wars against India.
This ‘lesser evil’ you speak of includes the murder, scalpings and torture of innocent young men unconnected to the militants. There’s a reason why every government has a criminal justice system instead of just death squads.
Killing innocent people is never ok.
Great. So how do we defeat them? By abusing the very freedoms and institutions that we are trying to protect?
amfd writes:
Whew! Thanks! Now we can all relax.
21 years after the incident, people take a stand against the Sikh riots after the GOI indicts certain people. Whereas, the same people pre-judge and sentence Modi just 2 months after Godhra, even before any court or GOI appointed commission finds him responsible.
Kangaroo trial, anyone?
M. Nam
There’s a reason why every government has a criminal justice system instead of just death squads.
Fair enough, but what if the criminal justice system is not up to the task or if the criminal justice system itself is under attack and at a risk of losing its power to those bent upon destroying that very institutional infrastructure? These are not idle theoretical questions : police in Punjab cannot possibly deal with terrorists based in Pakistan. What should they do – wait for Pakistan to extradite them? Here’s the list of terrorists operating from Pakistan still wanted by India in 2002 : http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1902/19020180.htm Good luck getting them!
Secondly, how would the justice system work when everyone – cops, prosecutors, judges, witnesses and so on were a target of violent retribution by terrorists? How would cops do their jobs if every day they feared for the lives of their children? Wouldn’t such a system be incapable of protecting the human rights of the victims of terrorism by becoming powerless to defeat them? When the system itself is under assault and at a risk of losing its power, how can you expect it to be used against terrorists? Look at Bihar today : the entire institutional structure has been subjugated to the power of criminals and warlords. Punjab was much worse because while Laloo and his thugs can at least be replaced in an election, Punjab terrorists were operating from Pakistan and supported by Zia and Benazir’s governments.
Killing innocent people is never ok.
It is 9:35 am on September 11 2001, you are Dick Cheney and you get a phone call from an F-16 pilot outside Washington DC asking you for orders to shoot down a hijacked civil aircraft with 200 passengers on-board that is about to crash into the White House in 60 seconds. What would you do, my friend? Would your answer change if there were 2000 people in the White House? What if the only person in the White House was the President of the United States, assuming that he could not whisked away to a safe place in the next 60 seconds?
Now ask yourself this : you are KPS Gill in Punjab in 1987. You have seen the bloody events of 1984 – operation Blue Star, assassination of Indira Gandhi, riots in 1984, assassination of General Vaidya – the chief of Indian army in 1986. You have intelligence that Pakistan is getting The Bomb from China, and will be nuclear capable in 1987-1988. You know that if you lose to Pakistan in this proxy war and allow the creation of Khalistan, millions of lives will be lost in a bloody re-enactment of Partition. What would you do?
Never say never, my friend : recognize the existence of moral dilemmas and the very tough choices that those in power have to make. Wars are not pretty and innocent lives are unfortunately lost in every war. This is precisely what makes terrorism such a difficult thing for civilized societies because it is war without rules. Some of their own citizens turn against other fellow citizens and the very ideals of freedom and democracy that the society stands for without any regard for norms of civilized behaviour. If the society continues to play by the rules while the terrorists don’t, then the society faces a very real risk of losing the war. What should they do? This is a tough moral dilemma and there are no easy answers. US, UK etc are only beginning to grapple with these really difficult social issues after their societies were attacked for the first time but India has been dealing with this forerver, thanks to being cursed by having delusional dictators living right next door. Buckle up – it’s gonna be a rough ride.
Intervening in a debate on an opposition-sponsored adjournment motion in the Lok Sabha, Dr Singh said, “There is absolutely no evidence” of involvement of late Rajiv Gandhi or any other high-ranking Congress leader in the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
Appealing to the opposition to put behind this bitterness, Dr Singh said, “We should throw away partisan spectacles and work together to find new pathways to ensure that such tragedies never take place.”
Go baby, Go!! Yesss!! (Sarcasm at high volume)
But Modi needs to be removed right away.
M. Nam
Fix the problem, the criminal justice system.
Pressure Pakistan to hand them over under threat of lobbing a few surgically targeted missiles at their training camps, with forewarning to prevent escalation.
If I were Dick Cheney I’d already have thrown myself under a train in a fit of conscience.
Tytler has resigned
I was so glad to see that he resigned.
I wish I hadn’t read the story though.
“Tytler is understood to have told that the reason he submitted the resignation to Sonia instead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was because he thought she was his leader.”
It is time for Congress to show some respect for the Office of The Prime Minister.
Tytler resigning is a good first step. Now let’s haul him up on charges.
Yes – it is time for the stables to be cleared.
Well, it shows who his master was all along, and how his dislike for Sikhs extends even to the point of such a childish snub.
Okay, so now he tenders a (resignation?) note to Manmohan Singh as well. Not sure abt the technicalities here.
Also, Dilip has an informative post about the total number of enquiry commission to investigate 1984 masaccre. 9. Yes, N-I-N-E!! Ennis, Manish, I think this piece of info shd go somewhere as an update to this post or your other 1984 posts. If nothing else, it certainly has archival and documentation value. Sincerely.
Hi all It hurts me to see so much nonsense flowing in India’s political establishment. I was a young newspaper reporter in Delhi when the holocaust hit us with such feral force that we were stunned. It was just 21 years ago and I still vividly recall every detail of what happened. The burning smell. Shreiks of women being raped. Burning men falling. Running children being gored to death. Mobs led by men who now great offices. And nine commissions later not one is punished. It stinks. It really does. I am sorry for my strong feelings but I am unable to get over 1984.
Good discussion here, as always. U had just one sideways comment on something Gujjubhai says above, abot how terrorism is “war without rules”.
True enough, but then no war, to my knowledge, has ever had rules that were observed during the war itself.
So when I understand that, I come to what I see as the real problem with terrorism: everybody has different ideas about what it is. For example, I see the massacre of 1984, the Godhra fire, the subsequent Gujarat killing, 9/11, the Bombay riots of 1992-93, 7/7, the Bombay bomb blasts — all as terrorism.
But I’m willing to bet some people on this very page are already disagreeing.
Another cockroach has resigned
Tytler maintains his innocence and that he is a victim of a conspiracy. However, there may be direct evidence of Tytler’s material involvement in the massacres:
And now Manmohan Singh apologises. I like this guy, he doesn’t mince any words. From Reuters:
Now if only he can take this forward by way of getting these murderers to book, then the apology will make any sense. Else it’s just a diplomatic eyewash. I have better expectations from this guy.
One thing I still don’t understand. Why should Congress bend over backwards to protect these lowlife scums like Tytler and Sajjan Kumar? It’s not as if they are some influential big-shots in the party. Any thoughts?
related BBC Article
Does anyone know how to get hold of the Report? I don’t suppose there’s an online source yet.
What is wrong with the picture on the Jagdish Tytler’s website ?
It shows a Sikh guy cheering behind him ?