Sikh Hurt

editorial:

It was at around this time back in 2009 that a Sikh journalist flung a shoe at the then Union Home Minister during a press conference. The act was obviously his way of registering his community’s desperation and disgust with the Congress’ utter failure in delivering either closure or justice to the community which was targeted by lynch mobs across the country in the 1984. Conservative estimates put the death toll in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots at 3,000. More than 2,700 of these lives were snuffed out in rioting in the nation’s capital there in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her bodyguards. The scale of madness which was allowed to erupt was unprecedented save the partition riots. To understand the hurt suffered and felt by the community, one must bear in mind that a sizeable section of Delhi’s Sikh population is made up of Partition victims. Families there, already traumatized with living memories of the 1947 horror, were visited by the murderous rampage of 1984. Their anger then, over three decades of stalling topped by the continued failure to convict the mob leaders and instigators is thus obvious. Five years ago, it led a senor Sikh journalist to hurl a shoe at the Home Minister and today it has released protesting Sikhs on Delhi roads protesting the acquittal of Congress leader Sajjan Kumar on charges of having led the mob which exterminated five members of a family at Delhi Cantonment’s Raj Nagar area in 1984. The case, even the CBI has reported in court, was compromised by Delhi Police. Handed over the case twenty years after the murders, CBI chargesheeted Sajjan Kumar only in 2010 and told the court there was a conspiracy of “terrifying proportion” between Kumar and the police during the riots. The anger boiling over to the streets is thus understandable. It is important that true justice, one which is accepted as just by the surviving families of the victims and allows them closure, is allowed to be delivered to the still hurting community. This is also important because only such justice will ensure that the state machinery is not deployed again to serve political ends. The CBI comment on the conspiracy of terrifying proportion between politicians and Delhi Police in 1984 is the cooption which made the post-Godhra riots possible. Ensuring that this conspiracy does not win will perhaps ensure that it is not repeated in the future.