This book analyses the experiences of women survivors and witnesses of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots

The past can be relocated in the present through a reconstruction of cities, sites and narratives, both literally and metaphorically, in the form of stories, songs, poems, slogans and sometimes festivals, and with collective community gatherings on several occasions in gurdwaras. The annual commemoration events held at memorial sites on the dates related to Chaurasi are significant. Radhika Chopra rightly remarks that

We do not leave our past behind; it’s a palpable presence in our present and we actively commemorate and remember the past in monuments and memorials, in texts, images, songs, stories, rituals, art, space and time and, I would add, in evocations of the spirit of persons.

She reiterates the contention of Halbwach and Eves, “It is in society that people acquire memory, localising the present in the past … the memory is collective not because its content is shared but because the process of remembering is shared”. Chopra engages with the split between the memorial and memories – while “memorials are placed in the dialogical relations of reference … remembrance is layered, weaving historical pasts and contemporary politics”. She recalls how the public places and the bazaars surrounding the site of events are also sites of remembrance. The bazaars surrounding Darbar Sahib are “replete with artefactual remembrance available as religious souvenirs”. They

amplify the messages of memory portrayed within the shrine and its museum. Despite the overwhelming presence of shrine-centric rituals, shop keepers have their own take on politics of memory promoted by orthodoxy. In and through the language of this the commemorations within the shrine in the aftermath of Operation Bluestar are both supported and critiqued. The folk of the bazaar see themselves as custodians of belief and their shops as sites of sanctity which are as significant as those within the complex of the shrine.

Apart from the commemorative events organised annually by Akal Takhat or gurdwaras in Delhi, there is a continual streak of remembrance for the survivors on the days when they have hearings in the courts and when dharnas are organised by the survivors, and these protest sites become sites of commemoration. For the survivors, demonstrations and protests have become a part of life as politicians make fake promises as political gimmicks. The survivors reported returning to dharnas for the fulfilment of these promises. Recalling, therefore, is a collective form of memory, as one of the survivors described how they empathised with one another in moments when their spirits began falling. They looked around at each other to find the same experiences and similar pain, very much in line with Chopra’s claim that people acquire memory in society as a group.

These concerns raise a series of considerable research questions: Is it possible to remember the traumatic experience that remains unforgettable? How to remember? Or is it possible to forget and move on? Why is remembering important and what could be the possible ways in which remembering is documented and presented? Giorgio Agamben, in the context of holocaust survivors, suggests, “The survivor’s vocation is to remember; he cannot not remember”. Every attempt to remember also brings to life the traumatic events. How does that affect the subject whose experience is being revisited? What purpose would “remembering” solve? Does remembering lead to recovery? Is recovery ever possible?

Primo Levi, a holocaust survivor, brings out how the memory of the traumatic events, in the case of a prisoner in the Nazi camp, remained fixed in his memory. He may have forgotten what happened before or after the camp but the prisoner vividly remembered every detail of his life in the camp: “I still have a visual and acoustic memory of the experiences there that I cannot explain … sentences in languages I do not know have remained etched in my memory, like on a magnetic tape”. At the same time, there may not be one single method to recall or remember.

Remembering can surface in several ways, in different forms of expression and even through silences that may be considered as an inability to recall. While for some, articulating may be therapeutic or healing, for others, silence may represent a sense of resignation. This was evident in the visit to a gurdwara within the Tilak Vihar widows’ colony, where photographs of men and children killed during the Chaurasi violence have been displayed in a very small room. Due to the paucity of space, hundreds of frames have been piled up on each other.

On entering the room, several women walk in to talk about their children and men, pointing at the photographs hanging on the wall. The expressions on the face of a boy about 4–5 years old, in a photograph, send shivers down the viewer’s spine, and the manner of his killing freezes one’s nerves. One wonders how this little kid could harm anyone. What danger did he pose to those in power? Did he deserve such a death?

Studies on violence, trauma and experience involve personal and subjective perceptions that provide a sense of alternate history from a survivor’s point of view, testimonies about all that went unrecorded. While it is understood that the judiciary follows a systemic procedure, rules, regulations, evidence and official records, those responsible for inadequacies at various levels, in maintaining records, or falling prey to the political pressures, or those who have to blindly follow orders of corrupt officers, are neither questioned nor made accountable. Pav Singh states:

Security forces, including both the police and the army, are rarely held accountable for abuses they commit, which at times are all too prevalent. In such circumstances, the normal rules of security and policing are often circumvented, and human rights abuses become rife, as they were in Punjab during 1980s and 1990s.

Such action, or rather inaction, sets precedents for the perpetrators and ensures the possibility of similar events in future. The impact of such incidents is manifold. Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Deputy Director at the Human Rights Watch, spells out the bearings of repeated examples of impunity on society in general: “India’s failure to prosecute those most responsible for the anti-Sikh violence in 1984 has not only denied justice to Sikhs but has made all Indians more vulnerable to communal violence”. The repeated obstruction in investigations by the authorities in order to “protect the perpetrators of atrocities against Sikhs, [has led to] deepening public distrust in India’s justice system”.

During Chaurasi, the involvement of many senior Congress leaders was ignored due to the lack of evidence regarding their direct involvement with the killings, though the affidavits submitted by the victims have named different Congress leaders who were supporting the mobs. Sanjay Suri, in his book 1984: The Anti-Sikh Violence and After (2015), devotes a chapter to Kamal Nath as Suri himself, as a beat reporter at the Rakabganj, was an eyewitness to his presence. He saw how Kamal Nath controlled the mobs by signalling them. The mob was more obedient to him than to the police present there on the site. Suri reports:

What did the police know about the crowd that they could stand back and decide to leave it in the hands of Kamal Nath? Indisputably, before their eyes, this was a Congress crowd. Just as indisputably, men from this crowd had killed two people, and were ready to advance to kill again. For a police force to stand by watching all this was itself illegal. The stillness of the police was actionable … . It is outside of law for a police force to stand and watch a political leader make moves to exercise control that was for them to enforce.

Suri also expresses his disappointment when the affidavit that he submitted to both Mishra and Nanavati commissions was not considered and was noted as “not [having] been ‘very clear’”. The complexity of the system fails to facilitate the survivors. Many affidavits reported instances where police remained insolent towards the victims. Manoj Mitta and HS Phoolka state, “The police, incidentally, did not register cases related to any of the incidents witnessed … In fact, not a single case of anti-Sikh violence was registered that day throughout Lutyens’ Delhi”.

The role of the police is quite questionable. Virginia Van Dyke discusses three different methods employed by the police while dealing with violence during Chaurasi. She explains that “they were either ‘conspicuous by their absence,’ passive observers, or acting in complicity by encouraging or actually participating in the violence”. Therefore, in such cases where the institutional machinery seems to have crumbled, one of the ways to expose the truth is through first-hand narratives of the survivors, mostly women. Unfortunately, their accounts are never considered sufficient evidence.

Excerpted with permission from Remembering the Past: Critical Perspectives on the Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984, edited by Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry, Orient Black Swan.