08-14-2005, 09:12 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>That old familiar feeling of '84 --Jaya Jaitly</b>
By Jaya Jaitly
Deccan Chronicle, August 14, 2005.
It made one feel sick and outraged again listening to the words of some Congressmen on television during the debate on the Nanavati Commission Report. Witnessing the slaughter and mayhem all over Delhi in 1984 was terrible enough, but to see Congressmen in Parliament full of hypocrisy, political scoring points, jeers at the Opposition and heartless bravado rather than providing a genuine response to the cry for justice, was to relive the anger of 21 years ago.
What is the definition of justice in the various events that led to the pogrom on the Sikhs in 1984? Was it justice when Operation Bluestar was conducted ruthlessly after allowing Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to stack a cache of arms inside the Golden Temple in Amritsar? Was revenge justified when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards? Was it justice when organised goons took revenge for her death on every Sikh they could find? Was it justice when the Congress party was forced by a PIL to institute an inquiry commission, or was it justice when they obtained whitewashed reports, one after another? In other words, what sort of action or reaction is an act of "justice"?
The Nanavati Commission Report will not satisfy the most optimistic who had hoped that a commission working without the interference of a Congress government would name the guilty clearly and unequivocally, and answer the only crucial issue that remains today - who organised the attack on the Sikhs all over the country, for there is no doubt even in Justice Nanavati's mind that the events were indeed organised. No other commission or committee called it an "organised carnage."
We must thank Justice Nanavati for the justice he has provided by stating this truth. If ordinary street goons organised them, the Congress Party must answer today why the Army or police did not come out in large numbers with lathis, teargas and bullets to stop the brutal atrocities for three days. Offering a truthful answer would be justice. The Congress Party has constantly passed off the 1984 massacres as "spontaneous anger." I was a witness to the fact that there was spontaneous shock, disbelief, stunned silence, but the only time I saw "anger" was when these "spontaneous" truckloads of men in white caps passed me by on Lodhi Road shouting "Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge."
We heard the same refrain broadcast from the cameras of Doordarshan which were trained on the same type of men at the gates of Safdarjang Road where Mrs Gandhi's body lay. Justice Nanavati provides only partial justice when he says that the killings from November 1 were not spontaneous because no one, including the media, reported "spontaneous anger" even on October 31, 1984.
The horrors of what happened in the bylanes of Delhi were known to everybody on the morning of November 1, because Sikhs were already being thrown over the Safdarjang flyover on the afternoon of October 31. I saved two persons by hiding them from the mobs in my car, keeping their two-wheeler at my house in Sujan Singh Park and reaching them to the police station at Tughlak Road at midnight so that they could be accompanied home under protection.
On the same afternoon when I asked policemen on Lodhi Road to stop the harassment of a group of Sikhs on the road a few yards behind us, they told me, "Drive on, you are not a Sikh. You need not worry." Overturned cars were already burning a few yards ahead but the policemen were unperturbed. As the sinister situation dawned on us we threw ourselves into preventive or relief work.
There are the agonies of those memories . of coming across melted flesh sticking to the road being pawed by dogs, long strands of men's hair cut in desperation to hide their identity, roofs broken through to throw burning rags and a strange white inflammable powder to set fire to homes and inhabitants, the cries for a pugree to save their izzat before food or medicines at Trilokpuri and subsequently at the camps, the locked doors of "butcher" Kishori and Ram Pal Saroj, assisted in getting bail by lawyers stationed at the homes of senior Congress leaders whom we met and fought with; the memories of running the Farash Bazaar camp for three months, delivering babies and bandaging gashed heads, our frustration and anger at finding that the "relief" provided by the lieutenant governor at the camps for the victims included colour televisions to watch Mrs Gandhi's funeral, the electric tension when H.K.L. Bhagat came to the camp and was refused entry, the tortuous hours noting the experiences of the survivors, each monotonously repeating the same story in shell-shocked tones and with blank expressions no matter which part of the city they had lived in.
These were published in a small black pamphlet called "Who are the Guilty?" which was later rubbished by the late Rajiv Gandhi as the act of a kangaroo court. Is Justice Nanavati's report like the same kangaroo court? Is that why the ATR of the government after pondering over it for six months treated it with scarcely hidden contempt?
Is it justice for the public exchequer to pay the salaries of those Congress leaders specifically mentioned in the report so that salt can be rubbed into the wounds of those seeking that elusive creature? Will true justice come if all the living dead are given a lakh of rupees more or a few jobs are found for the third generation of sufferers, or by a Pawan Kumar Bansal, MP (Congress) resorting to reading out at length in Parliament a ghost-written speech made by Mrs Sonia Gandhi on another occasion? Justice needs to be administered by people who care for more than the politics of power.
Instead, if the government defends or protects those whom the victims still remember leading the mobs that killed their loved ones both in living daylight and in their subsequent nightmares, justice surely must be given a new meaning <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
By Jaya Jaitly
Deccan Chronicle, August 14, 2005.
It made one feel sick and outraged again listening to the words of some Congressmen on television during the debate on the Nanavati Commission Report. Witnessing the slaughter and mayhem all over Delhi in 1984 was terrible enough, but to see Congressmen in Parliament full of hypocrisy, political scoring points, jeers at the Opposition and heartless bravado rather than providing a genuine response to the cry for justice, was to relive the anger of 21 years ago.
What is the definition of justice in the various events that led to the pogrom on the Sikhs in 1984? Was it justice when Operation Bluestar was conducted ruthlessly after allowing Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to stack a cache of arms inside the Golden Temple in Amritsar? Was revenge justified when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards? Was it justice when organised goons took revenge for her death on every Sikh they could find? Was it justice when the Congress party was forced by a PIL to institute an inquiry commission, or was it justice when they obtained whitewashed reports, one after another? In other words, what sort of action or reaction is an act of "justice"?
The Nanavati Commission Report will not satisfy the most optimistic who had hoped that a commission working without the interference of a Congress government would name the guilty clearly and unequivocally, and answer the only crucial issue that remains today - who organised the attack on the Sikhs all over the country, for there is no doubt even in Justice Nanavati's mind that the events were indeed organised. No other commission or committee called it an "organised carnage."
We must thank Justice Nanavati for the justice he has provided by stating this truth. If ordinary street goons organised them, the Congress Party must answer today why the Army or police did not come out in large numbers with lathis, teargas and bullets to stop the brutal atrocities for three days. Offering a truthful answer would be justice. The Congress Party has constantly passed off the 1984 massacres as "spontaneous anger." I was a witness to the fact that there was spontaneous shock, disbelief, stunned silence, but the only time I saw "anger" was when these "spontaneous" truckloads of men in white caps passed me by on Lodhi Road shouting "Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge."
We heard the same refrain broadcast from the cameras of Doordarshan which were trained on the same type of men at the gates of Safdarjang Road where Mrs Gandhi's body lay. Justice Nanavati provides only partial justice when he says that the killings from November 1 were not spontaneous because no one, including the media, reported "spontaneous anger" even on October 31, 1984.
The horrors of what happened in the bylanes of Delhi were known to everybody on the morning of November 1, because Sikhs were already being thrown over the Safdarjang flyover on the afternoon of October 31. I saved two persons by hiding them from the mobs in my car, keeping their two-wheeler at my house in Sujan Singh Park and reaching them to the police station at Tughlak Road at midnight so that they could be accompanied home under protection.
On the same afternoon when I asked policemen on Lodhi Road to stop the harassment of a group of Sikhs on the road a few yards behind us, they told me, "Drive on, you are not a Sikh. You need not worry." Overturned cars were already burning a few yards ahead but the policemen were unperturbed. As the sinister situation dawned on us we threw ourselves into preventive or relief work.
There are the agonies of those memories . of coming across melted flesh sticking to the road being pawed by dogs, long strands of men's hair cut in desperation to hide their identity, roofs broken through to throw burning rags and a strange white inflammable powder to set fire to homes and inhabitants, the cries for a pugree to save their izzat before food or medicines at Trilokpuri and subsequently at the camps, the locked doors of "butcher" Kishori and Ram Pal Saroj, assisted in getting bail by lawyers stationed at the homes of senior Congress leaders whom we met and fought with; the memories of running the Farash Bazaar camp for three months, delivering babies and bandaging gashed heads, our frustration and anger at finding that the "relief" provided by the lieutenant governor at the camps for the victims included colour televisions to watch Mrs Gandhi's funeral, the electric tension when H.K.L. Bhagat came to the camp and was refused entry, the tortuous hours noting the experiences of the survivors, each monotonously repeating the same story in shell-shocked tones and with blank expressions no matter which part of the city they had lived in.
These were published in a small black pamphlet called "Who are the Guilty?" which was later rubbished by the late Rajiv Gandhi as the act of a kangaroo court. Is Justice Nanavati's report like the same kangaroo court? Is that why the ATR of the government after pondering over it for six months treated it with scarcely hidden contempt?
Is it justice for the public exchequer to pay the salaries of those Congress leaders specifically mentioned in the report so that salt can be rubbed into the wounds of those seeking that elusive creature? Will true justice come if all the living dead are given a lakh of rupees more or a few jobs are found for the third generation of sufferers, or by a Pawan Kumar Bansal, MP (Congress) resorting to reading out at length in Parliament a ghost-written speech made by Mrs Sonia Gandhi on another occasion? Justice needs to be administered by people who care for more than the politics of power.
Instead, if the government defends or protects those whom the victims still remember leading the mobs that killed their loved ones both in living daylight and in their subsequent nightmares, justice surely must be given a new meaning <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->