The ghosts of 1984 still walk among us. It is forty years since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards on the morning of October 31, a killing that unleashed a savage wave of violence against Sikhs, mainly in the capital. By that evening, Delhi was burning. Over 3,000 Sikhs are believed to have died in and around Delhi – estimates vary from 3,000 to six times that number, the lack of a definite figure itself indicating a curious official indifference to the nature and scale of the violence that overtook Delhi and changed the lives of a community.
Unfortunately for New Delhi, the consequences of that violence are still being felt in India and abroad, as evident from the fallout in India’s diplomatic relations with Canada, the United States, and other countries over the issue of Khalistan, or a homeland for the Sikhs carved out of India.
Today, the idea of Khalistan still exercises enormous sway on diasporic Sikhs, even while support for this homeland is almost non-existent in Punjab, amongst the people who would presumably live there. The history is detailed and nuanced, but briefly, calls for Khalistan emerged soon after the independence of India and Pakistan, amongst Sikhs who felt that the partition of the subcontinent had betrayed their community, forcing many to move from their homes in west Punjab to India, often in the most violent circumstances.
Partition also physically divided the spiritual landscape of the Sikhs, with some of Sikhism’s most holy sites left in Pakistan, along with the capital of the erstwhile Sikh empire. Amidst domestic political manoeuvring, calls for Khalistan gained traction in the early 1980s, culminating in Operation Blue Star in June 1984 when the army was sent into the Golden Temple, one of Sikhism’s most holy sites, in pursuit of a separatist leader. The Golden Temple was badly damaged and hundreds of worshippers were killed in the crossfire.
Indira Gandhi’s assassination was said to be revenge for this desecration. That in turn triggered a brutal wave of coordinated violence against Sikhs in the 10 days after the assassination, which further fed the insurgency. Sikh separatism raged in the following decade, with tens of thousands of deaths in Punjab. Waves of Sikhs left Punjab at the height of the insurgency, nursing a bitter sense of betrayal by the Indian State. At home, the insurgency finally waned – partly brutally put down by the state, and partly suffering from the infirmities of the idea of Khalistan, which would have been a moth-eaten, physically vulnerable fragment of the original homeland of the Sikhs. But crucially, it has not waned as a result of any official attempts by India to address the trauma of 1984, because that never happened.
Official data does not exist on the victims of that violence. This apathy was established with the excuse offered at the time by the ruling party, that Indians were overcome with grief by the circumstances of Mrs Gandhi’s death – a grief that bubbled over into anger and ‘some riots.’ Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who was sworn in as prime minister the day she died, justified the bloodshed at a rally soon after: ‘When a big tree falls, the earth shakes a little.’
Rajiv Gandhi was of course wrong. The betrayal of Mrs Gandhi by her bodyguards – the men supposed to protect her, not kill her at close range in her home – does not justify the betrayal of India’s Sikhs when a mob was let loose on them and the official apparatus of the State turned a blind eye, or worse, facilitated the violence. Nothing has since been done to bring to justice those who killed and maimed and raped and looted. Amongst the Sikhs, not just in India but crucially for the global diaspora, ‘1984’ is now shorthand for the rupture of the pact between Sikhs and the Indian State – the belief that the State would protect its citizens.
Nor was the violence just a few ‘riots’. A riot implies two sides in conflict and a certain indiscriminate nature to the violence. The carnage that engulfed Delhi and some parts of north India (but significantly, not all states) was precise in its targeting of Sikh families. Sikh men and boys were killed – often dragged from their homes by a mob that included their neighbours and then hacked to pieces or doused with kerosine and set alight before their families. Homes and businesses owned by Sikhs were looted and burnt, while neighbouring establishments belonging to other communities remained untouched. This was not a riot, but a pogrom.
Yet officially, the savagery that overtook Delhi in 1984 is known as the ‘anti-Sikh riots’. This nomenclature allows the State to elide responsibility for betraying its citizens when witness after witness has attested to the involvement of police, bureaucrats, corporators, councillors, MPs, and other elected officials going all the way up to the top of government. The Congress party was in power at the centre and in the states where the violence raged. Since then, however, other political parties have formed those governments – parties that while in opposition had condemned the brutality, including members of this current government. Their indifference to the continued suffering of the survivors of 1984 is difficult to explain, unless these wounds are useful to pick for electoral gain. Without official acknowledgement, there has been no meaningful compensation and more importantly, no justice in terms of punishing the perpetrators of the violence, barring just one senior Congress politician, Sajjan Kumar, who was finally sentenced in 2018 on some charges, but not all. A handful of other cases drag on in desultory fashion, but for most part, those named by witnesses as instigating the mob or carrying out the killings have never been charged.
And meanwhile the victims of 1984 wait for some form of justice. These are widows and children who were left not just with the trauma of the circumstances of their bereavements but also without any earning male members of their families; without property and possessions and any official documents that might prove prior possession; and without any hope of return to the neighbourhoods that betrayed them. In short, without anything that might have given them a future in the dark days that followed the massacres of 1984.
The Sikhs who left India at the height of the insurgency carry the wounds that prompted their emigration. Some (but not all) have agitated for Khalistan based on their perceived betrayal by the Indian State. The most visible and vocal of these groups are in Canada, which hosts the largest Sikh community outside India. As a group, they are an electorally significant force in Canadian politics, and that is now being reflected in bilateral relations, as the recent crisis between Ottawa and New Delhi demonstrates.
Amongst India’s Sikhs, however, there is no traction for calls to carve out Khalistan from their current home. These calls emanate from diasporic Sikhs, people who left India and are unlikely to return. India’s Sikhs have had their homeland divided once and the violence and trauma of that partition lies just below the surface of a community that has tried to move on. Often not because they choose to forget, but because remembering is too painful. There is no appetite for a second partition. Quite simply, the Khalistanis do not speak for a majority of India’s Sikhs. It is unclear that they even speak for the majority of Sikhs in their new homes.
India will need to address the wounds of 1984. This cannot be precipitated from the outside. The health of India’s democracy rests in part on perceptions of security amongst its minorities. Unless the true nature of the violence of 1984 is acknowledged and addressed, there is always a chance that something similar could happen again. Justice for the victims of 1984 will also have international ramifications as it will blunt the sense of betrayal felt by those who left India during the height of the Punjab insurgency. It might finally put to rest the ghosts of Khalistan that roam abroad. Forty years on, it is past time to start healing.
Priyanjali Malik writes on politics and security in India and is the author of India’s Nuclear Debate: Exceptionalism and the Bomb. Views expressed are the author's own.