1984 Sikh riots: Will Cong stop shielding Tytler at least now?

Within hours of Indira Gandhi’s assassination on 31 October 1984, violence targeted at Sikhs erupted in parts of Delhi and other north Indian cities. They seemed, at the initial stages at least, to be a  mindless, spontaneous, unorganised response to the fact that Indira Gandhi had been gunned down by her Sikh security guards. But even the first outbreak of violence, as I recorded in my eye-witness account of the times ( here ), came laden with portents of giant upheavals to come. Others with better access to people in power too were sufficiently disturbed by the goings-on. Within hours of the anti-Sikh violence breaking out, Pupul Jayakar, a close associate of the Nehru-Gandhi family, went to Indira Gandhi’s son Rajiv Gandhi and urged him to call out the Army to snuff out the violence. With the moral authority that came from having known Rajiv Gandhi’s mother and grandfather, she reminded Rajiv Gandhi that had she been alive, Indira Gandhi would have done just that. For reasons that one can only surmise, Rajiv Gandhi did not act on her counsel. To low-life leaders in the Congress, Rajiv Gandhi’s silence - and his pointed inaction at a moment of impending conflagration - conveyed an unspoken licence to kill. Delhi Police authorities too read much the same message, and effectively stood down from controlling the violence, even though the Police Control Room war receiving a stream of agitated calls for help. [caption id=“attachment_693807” align=“alignright” width=“380”] Over three decades, Jagdish Tytler has been rewarded for his role in the 1984 pogrom. AFP[/caption] What seemed, on the previous day, to have been spontaneous violence targeting Sikhs turned, over the next three days, into a systematic pogrom directed at Sikhs, orchestrated and in some cases personally overseen by Congress leaders at various levels. Even in real time, before political conspiracy theories could gain ground, the names of four big-name Congress leaders were invoked by victims and eyewitnesses as the leading instigators. They were HKL Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler, Sajjan Kumar, and Dharam Dass Shastri. Yet, not one of the four faced any criminal prosecution. On the other hand, Rajiv Gandhi, rewarded both Bhagat and Tytler with ministerial postings in his government. On 19 November 1984, Indira Gandhi’s birth anniversary, he justified the pogrom that had been perpetrated against Sikhs as the inevitable upheaval when a giant tree fell. Years later, the Justice Nanavati Commission, which went into the bloody events of 1984, recorded the statements of several witnesses who testified to having seen and heard Tytler leading blood-thirsty mobs and instigating them to kill Sikhs and destroy property.  ( Read the full report, with the testimonies here .) It additionally records the statement of Jasbir Singh, one of those eyewitnesses, relating to Tytler’s role. Jasbir Singh, the Commission notes , stated that while he was passing by the TB Hospital Gate on 3 November 1984, he had seen and heard Tytler rebuking some people for not having killed enough Sikhs! That, according to Tytler (as recalled by Jasbir Singh), had “greatly compromised” him in the eyes of central leaders to whom he had promised “large-scale killings of Sikhs”. In other constituencies, Tytler is reported to have said, the number of Sikhs killed was markedly higher! Based on this and other affidavits, each more macabre than the other, the Nanavati Commission observed that it “considers it safe to record a finding that there is credible evidence against Shri Jagdish Tytler to the effect that very probably he had a hand in organising attacks on Sikhs.” It therefore recommended that the government take “further action as may be found necessary”. The only action that the Congress-led UPA government took was to dismiss the Nanavati Commission report findings saying it could not be dictated by the laws of probabilities into taking action against leaders. Nor was the reward for Tytler - despite the compelling evidence against him marshalled by several commissions of inquiry into the 1984 massacre  - an aberration of that time. Over the three decades since 1984, he has been given the party ticket to parliament on numerous occasions, despite the compelling evidence against him that he directly instigated the riots, and the charge that he coerced or attempted to bribe eyewitnesses who had testified against him to retract their statement. In 2009, it needed a shoe to be flung at then Home Minister P Chidambaram as a mark of protest against his statement - that he was glad that “my friend” Tytler had been given a clean chit by the CBI - for the Congress to sense the extent of Sikh rage and deny Tytler a party ticket. But even today, Tytler serves as an active member of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the topmost decision-making body in the party, and overseas party affairs in Odisha. And Ashwani Kumar, the man who, as CBI Director, overruled a recommendation by  former Joint Director Arun Kumar, for prosecution of Tytler, today serves as the Governor of Nagaland. This is the patronoage ecosystem that the Congress wields to reward plaint officers - and use the CBI as a blatantly partisan tool to promote its political interests. The Delhi court ruling on Wednesday directing the CBI to reopen the investigation into the 1984 violence - 29 years after the bloody event - is being read as a stinging slap on Tytler’s face and on the CBI. But, as everyone knows, a case is only as good as the prosecution, and much of the evidence has already been wiped out in the three decades since then. So, while the hope that the victims of 1984 will get  justice lingers, the prospects are not very high. Curiously, not one of the normally voluble Congress spokespersons would make it to the television studios on Wednesday night to defend themselves. As HS Phoolka, the person who has single-handedly pursued the cases against the politicians involved in the 1984 violence, noted, this reeks of double-standards on the Congress’ party, particularly since the same leaders are given to a high-decibel campaign against the Gujarat riots of 2002. “Of course, the guilty of the Gujarat riots too should be punished,” he acknowledges, “but the double-standards of the Congress party should be exposed.” What we saw in 1984 was, he says, “a genocide, the largest massacre in India” since independence. And the Congress is still in denial over it, he adds. Today, the 1984 massacre  and the 2002 riots have become the matter of a cynical political tug-of-war between the Congress and the national parties. Given its defence of Tytler and other instigators to this day, despite the compelling evidence against them, the Congress has much to answer for for the “original sin” - which showed for the first time in independent India that communal polarisation can pay electoral dividends.  Rajiv Gandhi was elected to power in December 1984 with a historic majority in Parliament for the Congress, which ran a shamefully communal campaign that year, which played on the bogey of Sikhs as terrorists. If only Rajiv Gandhi had acted on Pupul Jayakar’s advice of 1984, and the Tytlers of the world had been reined in at that time, it’s fair to say that India would have been a vastly different place today. That is the real significance of the reminder that the Delhi court prompted yesterday about the distant events of 1984.