India has till recently been hailed as a great success in its experiment of building a constitutional democracy. However, the history of modern India is also blotted with many instances of targeted mass violence against minorities from the Partition to Nellie Massacre in 1983 and to the Bombay riots in 1992 after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The Anti-Sikh riots of 1984 were one such dark episode that casts a shadow over the secular democratic trajectory of the nation.

In the early 1980s, the separatist Khalistani movement in Punjab committed some serious crimes including massacres, killings of minorities and murders of many communists. The government deployed troops in June 1984 to oust rebels who had seized the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of Sikh shrines. The military operation caused extensive damage to the shrine, killing hundreds of people, including tourists, activists, and security forces. The military action caused widespread resentment and drew condemnation from the Sikh community. Indira Gandhi was assassinated in an act of retribution by two of her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984.

In the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, organised armed groups with open support of the Indian National Congress openly walked the streets of Delhi, targeting gurudwaras, killing Sikhs and plundering their belongings. Accounts reveal how the Congress Party members provided the mob with voter lists, school registration farms and ration lists to specifically mark out Sikh homes and businesses in diverse neighbourhoods. The worst-affected were low-income Sikh neighbourhoods, where there was little police intervention.

Official figures estimate that 3,325 people were killed, in which Delhi alone accounted for 2,733 deaths, while the rest occurred in U.P., Haryana, M.P., Maharashtra and other states. Independent estimates put the death toll higher than the official estimates. The riots also caused massive displacement of Sikhs, especially from Delhi and widespread human rights abuses. The activist Ram Narayan Kumar meticulously documented around 600 cases of human rights violations in Punjab alone.

While all Congress-led states were blazing with fire and blood, the only state that could control this bloodshed was West Bengal. Jyoti Basu played an instrumental role in this. He ordered the army to be mobilised and requested volunteers from his party to come out in the open and defend the Sikh community. While other cities burned, leaving thousands of Sikhs dead, West Bengal remained relatively peaceful. The communist government in West Bengal was by and large successful in containing communal violence.

The State Machinery as Perpetrators of Injustice

Fact-finding groups and civil society organisations found that anti-Sikh violence in 1984 was led and mostly committed by activists and supporters of the Indian National Congress, some of whom later became members of parliament or held government positions. The police were merely standing by, and sometimes were complicit in the attacks. Instead of keeping those responsible for the violence accountable, many involved police officials and representatives of the Congress party were promoted over the last 30 years.

Ultimately, only 587 First Information Reports (FIRs), official complaints, were lodged by the Delhi police over three days of violence that resulted in 2,733 deaths. Of these, 241 cases were closed without investigation by the police, alleging an inability to trace evidence. Many committees and commissions were set up to discover the specifics of the killers after the rampage abated. In November 1984, the Marwah Commission was set up to inquire into the involvement of the police in the killings.

The central government was abruptly ordered to end the investigation and documents were selectively passed on to the next commission. This was followed by several committees like the Mishra Commission, Ahuja Committee, Kapoor-Mittal Committee and then Jain Banerjee Committee. The Jain-Banerjee committee recommended that a case against former Congress member Sajjan Kumar be registered by the police. To suggest rehabilitation for victims, the Dhillon Committee was set up in November 1985. It demanded that insurance claims from attacked business establishments be charged, but all such claims were denied by the government of the day.

Following a report by a commission headed by retired Supreme Court judge G.T. Nanavati in 2005, four of the cases that had been closed were reopened and reinvestigated. The majority of inquiries by government-led commissions and civil society organisations found that after news of Indira Gandhi’s death spread, the violence began spontaneously on October 31. But it took the form of a well-organized pogrom the next morning. The failure of India in 1984 to prosecute those most responsible for anti-Sikh violence not only denied Sikhs justice, but also made all Indians more prone to communal violence.

Nonetheless, this horror of communal killings and religious atrocities against minorities didn’t stop here. They are still continuing in the explicit forms like 1988 Muzaffarnagar, 1989 and ‘92 Bombay, 1990 Ayodhya, 2002 Gujarat, Saharanpur, Delhi or in an overt manner using state machinery to repress minorities even today. The Anti-Sikh riots of 1984 should be a grave reminder as to why we need to adhere to the constitution, demand better criminal justice delivery systems, safeguard the principles of democracy and secularism.

PSF-TISS