DNA Edit: The 1984 pogrom – Rahul’s clean chit to Congress ruins his political capital

They say public memory is notoriously short but the wounds of anti-Sikh riots are too raw to be relegated to an obscure past. The organised butchery of men, women and children that began in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984, across India claimed 3,000 lives, as per government reports. In reality, the death toll touched 8,000. Goons armed to the teeth, patronised by the Congress party, roamed the streets of the national capital. They raped Sikh women, killed Sikh men and burnt down Sikh houses. Post-Partition, the 1984 pogrom left the country in shock and horror with the sheer scale of the brutalities. Thirty-four years later, those who survived the genocide are yet to get justice. 

Rahul Gandhi’s statement that the Congress shouldn’t be held responsible for the killings was an insult to their pain and suffering. It bears an uncanny resemblance with what his father Rajiv Gandhi had said in justification of the massacre: “Once a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it shakes.” It was an official endorsement of a carnage that snuffed out innocent lives – people who had nothing to do with Sikh terrorism or anti-India operations. 

Former finance minister P Chidambaram has tried to defend Rahul, saying that the Congress President can’t be held responsible for what had happened when he was just 13 or 14 years old. True, Gandhi Junior didn’t take up arms; neither did his father. But, to say the Congress was not responsible for the genocide was a desperate attempt to whitewash history. In an interview in March 2014, Rahul had stopped short of tendering an apology for the 1984 slaughter but had gone on to say “that innocent people died in 1984 and innocent people dying is a horrible thing and should not happen”. 

Investigations carried out over the years revealed the hand of a few Congress leaders behind the orgy. They had played an active role in inciting people and unleashed bloodthirsty mobs on an unsuspecting community. The police stood as puppets as marauding hordes set about their task. The piles of bodies in Delhi and elsewhere were incontrovertible proof of how devastating a State-sponsored mass extermination could be. It is sad but true that even the criminal justice system had failed the Sikhs, many of whom had left the country after the violence. 

The Nanavati Commission set up to investigate the killings had filed a 184-page report after talking to hundreds of victims, eyewitnesses and some high-profile people. But survivors decried it as “a bundle of lies” that gave a free pass to the true masterminds. Rahul committed a political harakiri with his 1984 statement in UK Parliament. He squandered away the political capital he had accrued in the last few months as an opposition leader. By virtually turning a blind eye to ethnic violence and issuing a half-hearted apology, he lost public sympathy. Five years out of power, the Congress hasn’t learnt a lesson, least of all the party president. The teenager in 1984 hasn’t grown up even in 2018.