1984 - Thirty five years after
November 2, 2019 marks 35 years and a day that many of us went on a peace march in south Delhi to stop the carnage that had unfolded since late evening on October 31, 1984. I post this piece in memory of those painful events, and to pay respects to the dead.
IN 2014, on the 30th anniversary of 1984, I wrote an article that appeared in EPW. It was titled The Broken Middle, and its contents remain as relevant today as five years ago.
Here is the Hindi version: मध्यमार्ग का अवसान : दिलीप सि मियन
Download a PDF of the essay here
On November 24, 1984, we took out a citizens march for justice, from Red Fort to Boat Club, that had at least 5000 participants. It was blacked out by the media, except for a few lines in an inside page of the Indian Express. Details of the march are given in the article above.
Some weeks afterward, many students, teachers, journalists and other concerned citizens founded the anti-communal citizens action group, Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan; two documents relating to which may be read below:
A Brief History of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan (SVA)
CONSTITUTION OF the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan 1989
I also attach links to some more of my articles on communalism in contemporary politics. One was on the disturbances in JNU campus in February 2016, relating to Kashmir. I posted it as What is to be Undone. It was subsequently re-published by Quartz and Scroll.
The Abolition of truth - सत्य की हत्या was a comment on the shameless celebration of Gandhi's assassin that unfolded after the NDA victory in 2014. I posted it in 2015. And here are some more related comments: Do our leaders want to certify political assassination?
And this was a comment on an ongoing court case: The Supreme Court, RSS and Gandhi
After 1994 I was unable write at length about 1984. I post below what I wrote in 1994
The tenth winter: THE SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, JANUARY 16, 1994
Those familiar with the streets of Delhi will have noticed the contempt with which the police vehicles, large and small, treat traffic rules, to say nothing of the ubiquitous white Ambassadors bearing the middle bureaucracy. This is not only true of officialdom – buses stop in the middle of the road, stop signals are regularly violated, and lanes totally ignored. There is no awareness that traffic rules are for everyone’s safety. When the very authority which is paid to uphold these laws does the opposite, when the lack of civic sense appears to be all – pervasive, one begins to wonder if there is some deeper malaise at work.
IN 2014, on the 30th anniversary of 1984, I wrote an article that appeared in EPW. It was titled The Broken Middle, and its contents remain as relevant today as five years ago.
Here is the Hindi version: मध्यमार्ग का अवसान : दिलीप सि
Download a PDF of the essay here
On November 24, 1984, we took out a citizens march for justice, from Red Fort to Boat Club, that had at least 5000 participants. It was blacked out by the media, except for a few lines in an inside page of the Indian Express. Details of the march are given in the article above.
Some weeks afterward, many students, teachers, journalists and other concerned citizens founded the anti-communal citizens action group, Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan; two documents relating to which may be read below:
A Brief History of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan (SVA)
CONSTITUTION OF the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan 1989
I also attach links to some more of my articles on communalism in contemporary politics. One was on the disturbances in JNU campus in February 2016, relating to Kashmir. I posted it as What is to be Undone. It was subsequently re-published by Quartz and Scroll.
The Abolition of truth - सत्य की हत्या was a comment on the shameless celebration of Gandhi's assassin that unfolded after the NDA victory in 2014. I posted it in 2015. And here are some more related comments: Do our leaders want to certify political assassination?
And this was a comment on an ongoing court case: The Supreme Court, RSS and Gandhi
After 1994 I was unable write at length about 1984. I post below what I wrote in 1994
The tenth winter: THE SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, JANUARY 16, 1994
Those familiar with the streets of Delhi will have noticed the contempt with which the police vehicles, large and small, treat traffic rules, to say nothing of the ubiquitous white Ambassadors bearing the middle bureaucracy. This is not only true of officialdom – buses stop in the middle of the road, stop signals are regularly violated, and lanes totally ignored. There is no awareness that traffic rules are for everyone’s safety. When the very authority which is paid to uphold these laws does the opposite, when the lack of civic sense appears to be all – pervasive, one begins to wonder if there is some deeper malaise at work.
Some forms of social derangement underpin
all the others. The gap between the claim to being law-governed and the actual
observance of rules is one of them. Traffic rules are the least of them.
Electoral laws and the Penal Code regulations governing incitement have, until
the last general elections, been flouted without compunction. It remains to be
seen whether the Election Commission can prevent the misuse of religion and
election symbols in future.
When certain top police officers took to
preaching inter-religious warfare after they retired, one wondered how they
could have functioned impartially while in service. College principals engage
in the practice of discretionary admissions, bypassing established procedures,
and inculcating amongst the youth the gentle art of queue-jumping. Opinion
makers applaud the handcuffing of students who cheat in examinations, but not
much is heard of the need to make accountable those teachers who neglect their
classes. Elite groups of businessmen and officials mysteriously obtain prime
urban land at throwaway prices. The list is endless.
Why grumble at all this? The flouting of
rules is accepted with various degree of resignation. Like black money, it is
assumed to have its functions. What the ruling castes/classes do not realize is
that this attitude has an indelible impact upon popular perceptions of right
and wrong. I remember as a child seeing Pandit Nehru and senior leaders moving
about in the city and at public exhibitions with ease. Today’s leaders and
senior officials live in glorified prisons. Do they realize that this
predicament is of their own making?
Across the enormous linguistic distances in
our society, certain messages get through clearly enough – some people live
above the rules, while the rest of us have to negotiate them somehow. And for
the mass media, there are some crusades which may be launched, while grievous issues may conveniently be forgotten.
Thus, Naxalite violence is awful, but if a
few thousand people are murdered in a couple of days in the name of God
Almighty, this is unfortunate, but inevitable. The greater the enormity, the
larger the number of publicists who may be found rationalizing it, using it to
make money, or putting their consciences to sleep. I was aghast at the number
of gruesome and provocative photographs published by the Gujarati press in
Surat, where I happened to be resident in December 1992. In Bombay, Doordarshan
telecast a Marathi programme on Shivaji’s weapons on one of the worst mornings during
the violence a year ago.
I sometimes wish that the intellectuals,
who rationalize brutality could be made witnesses to these ‘nation building’
activities when they take place; as for instance, when little girls were
heinously done in on a train at Udhna, near Surat, on December 9, 1992 (the
details are too painful to recount). But I doubt whether this will make any
difference. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, Hitler’s notorious terror arm,
which presided over the annihilation of European Jews, once asked for about a
hundred victims to be machine-gunned in front of him. The carnage caused him to
faint and suffer a nervous fit. But, there was no change in his character or
activities.
This is the tenth winter since the
slaughter of innocents in India’s capital, an event which, in my view, carried
as much import for ‘midnight’s children’ as Partition did for our seniors. (May
I repeat here, in passing the demand that the ban on The Satanic Verses be lifted?). For years afterwards, there was a
conspiracy of silence about it, matched by the shameless determination of the
national government to thwart the judicial process. There is no sign that
Parliament will even pass a resolution of condolence. None of the national
parties has carried out a sustained agitation for justice. And does it sit easy
upon the conscience of the politicians making the latest gestures in that
direction that they were themselves the prime movers of violence and mayhem
directed against Muslim citizens? These matters are not party issues any more.
They concern the legitimacy, not of this or that government, but of the Indian
Union. Those who swear by national unity must seriously consider the effect
upon state institutions of the undermining of constitutional rules and
processes.
Let me underscore the difference between
civil and criminal law. The first concerns disputes within relationships of a
social or commercial nature. The second relates to the physical safety of the
citizens and their property. If there is no such uniform criminal law in India
– and such is indeed the case factually, though not technically – there can be
no common civil law either, and the moral fabric of society will be torn apart.
Yet there is no life without optimism, and Indian society has always carried
its own antidotes. I shall make reference again to Gujarat. The purohit of a small temple in Baroda,
wrote a moving account of his anguished reactions to the events of December 6,
1992. His views were humane, compassionate and steeped in his own religiosity.
He remains a common man, worthy of the respect of many of our VIPs. A news report
dated January 12, 1994 tells us that tens of thousands of citizens in Sidhour,
Mehsana, took a public pledge of peace, with killers openly repenting their
crimes and the families of the victims declaring their forgiveness. The ends of
justice and social order requires nothing more.
In the tenth winter since 1984 and the
first since the demolition of the desolate Babri Masjid, the citizens of
Sidhpur have reminded us of the delicate, tenuous, and profoundly ethical
nature of the ties that bind us. Rules must apply to everyone, or there is no
point having them at all. And the first rule has to be a respect for human life
and dignity.
Dilip Simeon