1984 riots: The Lives of Others

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That phone call seemed to have brought the world around me crashing down. "Go check," a police officer called me a little after nine that morning of October 31 to say. "Indira has been hit by bullets. They have taken her to the Medical Institute."

I headed off to AIIMS on my scooter fast as I could. The outside gates were still open, but the main block had been sealed off. We knew what was announced on radio only by early afternoon: that Indira Gandhi was dead, shot dead by two Sikh police bodyguards.

The day went in gathering as much detail as I could about the assassination. But by evening the first reports of violence came in, from outside the Medical Institute. Sikhs passing by, heading home, many of them, were being attacked. And we heard the first of that slogan of murder that was to go around Delhi: "Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge."

Sky

The next morning it was hard to believe this was the Delhi I knew. The police offered no information on the phone. And the only lead I could get on where there was trouble was by looking up at the sky, where the pillars of smoke seemed thickest. On my scooter I went chasing one pillar of smoke after another, all over south Delhi. The Guru Harkishan Public School in Vasant Vihar was in flames; books, stationery, furniture had been set on fire. Mobs roamed the roads, stopped traffic when they chose to, looking for Sikhs.

One obvious place to check for trouble was the gurdwaras. I made my way to Rakab Ganj gurdwara, where I saw the still smouldering bodies of two Sikhs who had been burnt alive by a mob outside. And this was while a very large police contingent stood by, all wearing riot gear - to protect themselves. And still I had no idea what scale of killing was being prepared for that night, or even taken place the past night. It was only after the next day after seeing how much killing had taken place, and at how many places, that I reported that these were not murders, these were massacres.

There were primarily all of three reporters who went around Delhi at the time to report what was happening; my friend Rahul Bedi also from The Indian Express, Joydeep Gupta from The Statesman, and myself. The fact is there really was no fourth. There were these other papers, with their teams of reporters. Where they were, what they did, nobody knows. But that so many facts became known at all was thanks to some remarkably bold reporting by Rahul Bedi and Joydeep Gupta - they were going into those areas that people were afraid even to talk about, like Trilokpuri for instance from where Rahul reported the extent of massacres on a scale no one had thought possible.

Sultanpuri

It was again only on November 2 that we were able to get to Sultanpuri because we heard from people calling the office of the killings there. We headed there in the office car, I was driving because the drivers were too scared to go anywhere in Delhi those days. Anyone really could have been stopped, or killed anywhere; mobs were roaming the city, the police were almost nowhere to be seen, it was all anarchy on the streets, with a particular sanction that the 'law' was letting you loot and kill Sikhs.

With me in the car was Sevanti Ninan, the columnist, Ashwini Sarin the star reporter and later chief reporter from the Express, and some Joshi I think, a reporter from Jansatta. Someone pointed out where the killings had been taking place. I turned into a street and drove down, but we were stopped by a group of men, many of them in white kurta-pyjamas, with the Congress of the resettlement colony kind written all over them. Everything was fine, there had been no trouble at all, and we should go back, they said.

Further up, I saw someone leaning out of a door and beckoning to us to come forward. We ignored the men in kurta-pyjamas and drove on. The man there had shaved off his beard, and cut his hair. More than 150 of the Sikhs in that area had been killed the previous night, he said to me in Punjabi. And these men were now preparing to come and finish off all the rest, and they would come also for the women, he said. He begged us to save them; we were the first contact they had had with anyone beyond those encircling men. We promised to do all we could to help, and turned back.

The Congress party men (they were indeed from the Congress as I later confirmed) blocked us. They were now afraid that we might now go and report them, now that we had spoken to one of the surviving Sikhs within the colony. The man closest to me suddenly punched me hard on the face. He then tore at my shirt and snatched my note pad. Just then, someone was trying to open the back door to the left, where Sevanti was sitting. I didn't wait a moment; I put the car into gear and drove off fast, dodging narrowly some chaps who tried to block us.

We were then able to make some phone calls to the police headquarters and to the local police. We know that rescue teams were sent, and that with army units out in that area that evening - finally - people there were safe, and there were no more killings out there.

The fact is that when and where the police chose to act, they were effective. As was the police officer Maxwell Pereira. A mob was advancing upon Sis Ganj gurdwara in Chandni Chowk, and some Sikhs came out carrying swords. Over their dead bodies, they shouted. Pereira sent them back in. He then ordered a constable to shoot dead one chap from the advancing mob. And then ordered his men to display that body to the mob - this would happen to them if they advanced further. The mob vanished, and the gurdwara was protected. Brutal policing - but effective.

East Delhi

But such action was rare. Nowhere did the police seem to do less policing than in East Delhi. Large-scale killing had taken place, we kept hearing. I went there, and confronted this officer Sewa Dass on duty because Rajiv Gandhi was to visit East Delhi. Two people in East Delhi had died, he told me. The official count showed later that more than a thousand had been killed in that part of Delhi. The police were covering their inaction, and worse, with lies, lies, all over the place. We really had no source of information that we could trust. The only way was to run around and check out as much of hearsay as we could. Too, too often it all turned out to be much worse than what we heard.

But Sewa Dass had certainly used his police force to 'tidy up' the area for Rajiv Gandhi's visit. Bodies had been dragged away, some in that rush were just hidden from the sight of what a passing motorcade might see. In the end Rajiv Gandhi did not come. And so he did not get to see that as the police had showcased it, 'all was well'.

The police gave us the line that the local Sikhs were the aggressors, and were attacking people. Sikhs had barricaded themselves inside the Durgapura gurdwara, the DCP said, and had attacked what he said was an innocent crowd. And so naturally, people had retaliated. Sewa Dass said. Joydeep and I decided to walk up to the gurdwara. And there, all we saw were some people, many of whom had cut their hair, huddled and in hiding, crying out for rescue. No armed people around preparing to attack the innocent outside; it was absolutely the other way round. Before Joydeep and I went in there, no one, and certainly not the police had come to see what was going on, and to ask if they might need help.

Killers Protected

All through it was clear that the police were taking no action against killers, if not actually protecting them. I saw that obliquely when I went to the Karol Bagh police station a couple of days later. When I reached Karol Bagh police station, there was an almighty row going on within. It seems that the Congress MP Dharam Dass Shastri and some of his fellows were arguing with the deputy commissioner of police Amod Kanth. Kanth's senior Hukum Chand Jatav was backing the MP against Kanth. Shastri and his fellows wanted Kanth to release their chaps who had been caught looting. Amod Kanth was shaken, almost in tears. I was watching all this though a window from outside, after Jatav had me thrown out of the room. I remember that at one point the SHO came out shaking his head. Every time the police want to do something, the politicians stop them, he said.

I later challenged Hukum Chand Jatav, then additional police commissioner for the range over what had happened at the police station. It did not happen, he said. But I had seen and heard, I said. No I had not seen anything or heard anything, he said. Officials denied everything, and by official records, more than 3,000 people were dead.

There was a follow-up to that incident. Dharam Dass Shastri was denied a ticket for the parliamentary elections. And I gathered later from Rajiv Gandhi that this was because of this incident. I was later covering the elections for The Indian Express, and I had gone to an election rally in Amethi. I found Sonia Gandhi at the rally, more or less standing on her own. I walked up to her to ask if I could find Rajiv Gandhi somewhere. She said he would be along, and he was, very soon. I then spoke to Rajiv Gandhi, briefly, asked him the question that everyone was asking. That Congress leaders had been involved in the violence, and why was action not being taken. He said to me that in one case they had found wrongdoing, and denied a ticket. That clearly was a reference to Dharam Dass Shastri.

There was no time for further questions. But it left that question hanging, whether that sort of action was enough, and against one person. Serious questions had arisen about other MPS, against whom no action seems to have been considered. Sure, there was a trend then of painting them all killers. Including poor Jagdish Tytler, whom I have never seen after 1984. From all I could see and others said, Tytler was in no way involved in the killing. So far as I can remember, when the killing started he wasn't even in Delhi. That leaves open the possibility, theoretically, that he may have given orders on the phone, but I doubt it; none of the pattern of violence that broke out in his area seemed to suggest such a thing.

Fraction

We knew even then, how tragic it was that we were able to do so little, we knew acutely also how small a fraction of everything our reporting was. We knew that there were many, many more scenes of killing we simply never got to, we were only three reporters who were going out, it took a long time getting anywhere, and we had to be back in time to file our reports. How overnight it all changed, how our news values changed. Rushing back to our typewriters back in the office at eight in the evening we were told someone had called from somewhere to say there were bodies here, bodies there. There was nothing we could do, we could not even report what we heard like this, even though later many of these reports turned out to be true.

What we did in the Express we could not have done without support from our editor, George Verghese. He made it possible for us to go. And to get past the simplest kind of obstacles that office bureaucracies place - like taking the car when no driver was willing. And back to file at the end of a day knocked out by what we had had to see, and by exhaustion, George Verghese had food cooked for us in the office, and he himself brought it to us, and served it to us as, we sat writing our stories. And it was not only for this that so many of us have always thought of him as a great editor, and a great man.

The Injustice Later

The reporting done, there was more to do. It was clear that we were more than reporters, that my eyewitness accounts could make me a useful witness once the reporting was over. And so when the Mishra Commission was instituted into the killings, I filed three affidavits before it, where I had seen police inaction and the presence at least of Congress leaders. My affidavits were turned down in what seemed like Kafkaesque fashion - I could not prove I was there and therefore it could not be established that I had seen what I had seen.

They asked me at the commission whether I could produce an independent witness who could prove that I had been there. Then they asked me to produce a logbook from The Indian Express which might record where all I had been at precisely what time. I was outraged by the demands, and said so. Which reporter goes anywhere with an independent witness in tow, who would in any case then not be independent, and who keeps such logbook? Calm down, don't react, a court official told me with a professional smirk. I was just being naïve, wasn't I, too immature to know the ways of courts, and of the manner of handing out justice known to that Supreme Court judge who sat on his exalted seat in that room.

I presented the affidavits again before the Vaidyanathan commission and someone asked where precisely I was at how many minutes to 4pm. I couldn't remember 17 years later then where I had been to the minute. I doubt I would have remembered the next day.

The fact is that one inquiry commission after another led to nothing. The only report that mattered was never made public - the inquiry by Ved Marwah, later the police commissioner. I am convinced that the report by Marwah - as bright and upright an officer as any the Indian police have ever had - is the most full account that exists into what happened, and particularly of the failings of the police. Which is why no government has made that report public.

Heartening

And yet through those bloody days and nights we heard also the most heartening stories. Of how many hundreds and thousands of Sikhs were saved by non-Sikh friends and neighbours. Many of these stories I heard only much later, at refuge and help centres for Sikhs that came up all over the city, and where my wife, then pregnant, was working day after day. And it is these stories - that had spread very quickly to Punjab - that meant no Sikh turned against any non-Sikh in Punjab. What everyone would speak of as the Punjab problem never was a Punjabi problem. These stories were not news - but they became known. And how that saved everything at the time, maybe even, how that saved India then.