Mukul Kesavan - Sulphur in the air: 1984 is not forgotten. Kamal Nath’s elevation as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh is a bid to normalise the nadir of our history as a republic
People all seek to know what they do not know yet;
they ought rather seek to know what they know already - Zhuangzi
NB: A very important comment. Major sections of India's ruling elite have normalised genocide. Those of us who lived through the nightmare of 1984 will not allow the ruling class to wish it away. The Congress leadership could have made amends in a small way by accepting responsibility for the massive and bloody schism they opened up in the body politic. But instead, by appointing Kamal Nath at the CM of Madhya Pradesh, they have rubbed salt into the wounds of Indian citizens. That means all of us, not just the Sikh community. Many of us carried out a prolonged campaign for justice. We cannot and will not forget.
they ought rather seek to know what they know already - Zhuangzi
The 1984 carnage was (and still is) used by the so-called Sangh Parivar to justify the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Now their ruthless incitement of violence towards religious minorities and cynical disregard for the law will receive ideological nourishment by the equally cynical conduct of the Indian National Congress. What its leadership has done now is no less deadly than what Pranab Mukherjee did by praising the so-called patriotism of the RSS in June this year. Our major political organisations have divided up the work of criminalising the political system. Shame on you.
All of us had better think of why we calmly accept the recurrence of mass murder and lynching as an inevitable part of Indian political life. There is only one suitable description of this: we inhabit a culture of genocidal complicity of our own creation.
Communalism has destroyed our humanity, our sense of justice and our very conscience. We cannot sustain a democratic constitution with such a diseased civic sense. Here is my essay on the 30th anniversary of 1984. A Hindi translation may be read here. Readers may refresh their memories. DS
Kamal Nath’s
appointment as the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh is widely seen as an
instance of realpolitik. It isn’t that. There are moments in the life of a
country that are sacred. Not because they represent goodness but because they
embody evil. The pogrom of 1984 when thousands of Sikhs were murdered with the
complicity of the ruling party, the Congress, is such a moment. 1984 is our
compass, our degree zero, our never-again. It is a sacred moment because its
vileness isn’t negotiable. As citizens it helps us find political North because
when a person or a party fudges the starkness of its evil, we know that we are
in the presence of insidiousness. We can smell sulphur in the air. Kamal Nath’s
elevation is worse than hard-nosed cynicism: it is a bid to normalise the nadir
of our history as a republic.
Kamal Nath was accused
of leading a mob outside the Rakabganj gurdwara during the
pogrom. Two Sikhs burned to death in his vicinity. His presence at the gurdwara was
testified to formally by the police and a journalist. H.S. Phoolka and Manoj
Mitta in their book on the pogrom point out that his presence for two hours at
the head of a mob near the gurdwara was never satisfactorily
explained. The closest Kamal Nath came to an explanation was to say that he was
there at the behest of Rajiv Gandhi. He denied complicity in the violence and
the Nanavati Commission set up two decades later to enquire into the pogrom
gave him the benefit of the doubt. “In [the] absence of better evidence it is
not possible for the Commission to say that he had in any manner instigated the
mob or that he was involved in the attack on the Gurdwara.”
None of the
high-profile Congressmen accused of abetting mob violence during the pogrom was
convicted: despite allegations, H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler
survived probes and investigations for want of clinching evidence, the sort of
evidence that seldom survives the State’s complicity in organised killing.
Bhagat, Kumar and Tytler, however, had their political careers cut short
because of their association with 1984. Kamal Nath prospered.
He was an intimate of
Sanjay Gandhi, a part of the gang of young courtiers who defined the craven
political culture of Mrs Gandhi’s durbar in her last years.
From Sanjay Gandhi’s thuggish orbit to 1984, Kamal Nath is both a survivor and
a representative of a dark time that the Congress tried to put behind it. The
appointment of Manmohan Singh as prime minister twenty years later was seen as
a landmark in this process of unspoken contrition. Then, in 2005, Singh
addressed the matter directly (or as directly as a Congressman could) when,
during a parliamentary discussion on the Nanavati Commission report, he
responded to Opposition demands for an apology by saying this: “I have no
hesitation in apologising to the Sikh community. I apologise not only to the
Sikh community, but to the whole Indian nation because what took place in 1984
is the negation of the concept of nationhood enshrined in our Constitution. On
behalf of our government, on behalf of the entire people of this country I bow
my head in shame that such a thing took place.”
The absence of a mea
culpa for the role of his party didn’t go unnoticed at the time but
the symbolism of Singh’s elevation allowed people to give Sonia Gandhi’s
Congress the benefit of the doubt. Thirteen years later, it’s clear that Sonia
Gandhi’s son and heir doesn’t share Singh’s sense of shame and contrition about
that hideous pogrom and his party’s role in it. If he did, he wouldn’t have
chosen Kamal Nath to represent the Congress’s political revival.
Rahul Gandhi was
fourteen years old when his grandmother was assassinated and thousands of Sikhs
killed in retaliation. He might have been too young to take in the enormity of
that massacre. That doesn’t absolve him: as the president of the Congress, he
represents the party’s institutional memory. Everything that the party has done
to put daylight between itself and that dark night of its political soul can
now be reasonably seen as cynical tokenism. Since the Congress used Singh as
its shield, perhaps he owes the national audience that was moved by his public
contrition a postscript: what does he think of Kamal Nath’s coronation? That
sense of shame that he channelled on behalf of his government... where has his
party parked it now?
The contemptible thing
about the high command’s choice is that it takes advantage of the generous,
robust-to-the-point-of-heroic resilience of Sikhs in forging past those that
did them evil. Thirty four years after the pogrom, it is almost possible — if
you didn’t have a husband or a father killed — to persuade yourself that it was
a kind of dream, so seamlessly have Sikhs reclaimed the cities that turned on
them. So like the modern faux penitent, the party thinks it’s
time to move on.
Chief Minister Kamal
Nath is living, breathing proof of the peace the Congress made with 1984. There
will be plausible people-like-us with their hearts-in-the-right-place who will
try to explain his elevation away. The factionalism in Madhya Pradesh, they’ll
murmur in extenuation. Or speak of the need to empower a man who gets things
done in the run-up to the general election of 2019. It isn’t, they’ll suggest,
a time to be fastidious about an unlucky detour in ’84. Besides, nothing was
ever proved; commission after commission found no hard evidence of his
involvement. And so they’ll go on, half shamefaced, because even they can hear
themselves echoing the sangh’s defence of its monsters. The
Congress thinks it’s safe to forgive itself.
It isn’t safe because
1984 isn’t forgotten. The same day that Kamal Nath was appointed chief
minister, the novelist, Amitav Ghosh, was chosen for the Jnanpith award.
Ghosh’s greatest essay is, arguably, “The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi”, his
near-documentary account of both the horror of 1984 and the rousing solidarity
summoned into being against it. A generation of (once) young people was
politically formed by their experience of that pogrom, that glimpse of the
abyss. That cohort is still with us and its members will not be easily
explained away as dead-enders stuck in an irrelevant yesterday.
Kamal Nath isn’t a
means to the BJP’s end. To accept the alibi of the lesser evil is to embrace a
selective amnesia about the horrors of our past. Once we edit our memories for
the sake of an urgent present, we’re lost because the truest sentence ever
written about modern politics is still Kundera’s: “The struggle of man against
power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/kamal-nath-may-be-cm-of-madhya-pradesh-but-the-anti-sikh-pogrom-of-1984-is-not-forgotten/cid/1678944see also
मध्यमार्ग का अवसान : दिलीप सिमियन (The Broken Middle, EPW, November 2014)
