Gujrat facts that must be referred to in every discussion on Gujrat (Lavakare on rediff)

[Guest guest]

<pcdeshmukh> wrote:

What was the provocation?

What was the retaliation?

What was the counter-retaliation?

What did the police do, and when?

What did the army do, and when?

How many Muslims killed?

How many Hindus killed?

How many Hindus went to refugee camps?

How many Muslims went to refugee camps?

--------------------------------

Facts compiled below by Arvind Lavakare will help,

that is, if one cares to refer to them!

--------------------------------

 

 

These ghosts just don't go away

 

http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/22arvind.htm

June 22, 2004

 

- Arvind Lavakare

 

While our media was helped by A B Vajpayee in Manali

to raise the Gujarat ghost of 2002, Prime Minister

Manmohan Singh resurrected another, but forgotten,

ghost: the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. When he visited a

gurdwara in Delhi the other day, he prayed that the

two events would never happen again.

All of us pray for the same, wishing to let the past

be. But our English-language press is not content with

that; pouncing on Vajpayee suddenly pointing a finger

of guilt at Modi, the press is eager to rub the

Gujarat salt into the BJP's lesion of Election 2004.

 

Has the Congress atoned for the Sikh carnage of 1984

by installing a Sikh as prime minister? Or has it

atoned by making Jagdish Tytler, the same man who was

among several Congressmen suspected of having had a

hand in that carnage, a minister of state?

 

The 20th anniversary of that event is occasion enough

to juxtapose the two ghosts. Since readers in India

and abroad have, for over two years, been flooded with

all kinds of detail about it from a large spectrum of

writers, Gujarat 2002 is best left summarised as

below.

 

Gujarat 2002 riots

 

Provocation: On the morning of February 27, at Godhra

station, 58 Hindu passengers returning from a

pilgrimage to Lord Ram's Ayodhya were scorched alive

by a Muslim mob.

 

Retaliation: While nothing much happened on February

27 itself, a mass vendetta commenced on February 28.

For two days thereafter, Hindu groups indulged in

arson and loot, raping and killing.

 

Counter-retaliation: Francois Gautier, a Delhi-based

French journalist, wrote that subsequently there were

157 riots and that all of them were started by Muslim

groups (India Today, June 24, 2002).

 

Victims: In the three months following the Godhra

massacre, the official figure is 800 dead, of which a

quarter were Hindus. Another estimate is 1,050 dead,

of which Hindus were 250. Of the 98,000 persons sent

to refugee camps, 10,000 were Hindus.

 

Government action: A five-man fact-finding committee

of The Council for International Affairs and Human

Rights headed by D S Tewatia, a former chief justice

of the Calcutta and Punjab and Haryana high courts,

reported that:–

 

By the afternoon of February 28, it was clear that the

communal violence had spread widely and the situation

had become so alarming that it was unlikely to be

controlled by the police and paramilitary forces.

Hence, at 4.30 pm that day, the chief minister

announced at a press conference that the state

government had decided to call the army to assist the

civil administration. And by that evening the Union

government had given instructions for the deployment

of two brigades in Gujarat.

The Union defence minister flew to Ahmedabad at

midnight and had a meeting with the chief minister to

discuss deployment of the army. Troops needed to be

withdrawn from the country's border with Pakistan,

where they were deployed in full strength in an

eyeball-to-eyeball situation.

Within 24 hours, one brigade of the Indian Army had

landed in Ahmedabad. In a meeting at 8 am in which the

chief minister, defence minister, army generals, and

civil officers participated, the formal plan for

deployment of the army was approved. Magistrates

needed to accompany the army were appointed and by 11

am on March 1 the actual deployment of the army at

sensitive points had begun.

The second brigade was deputed to Rajkot and Vadodara

on the night of March 1.

Columns allotted to Godhra reached there on the

morning of March 2.

The army went back to the barracks on March 10.

What did the Gujarat police do? In the first 48 hours

of the violence, they arrested 3,900 persons, of whom

two-thirds were Hindus (Sanjoy Banerjee, 'Indian

Politics in this Age', Indian Currents, June 2002). By

April 5, 9,500 persons had been arrested, of whom

two-thirds were Hindus. 'The Gujarat police did try to

restore law and order.' (Prem Shankar Jha, 'Gujarat: A

Sober Diary', Outlook, April 22, 2002.) National

Minorities Commission Chairman John Joseph noted, 'As

on April 6, 126 persons were killed in police firing,

of whom 77 were Hindus.' (Kay Benedict, 'Bad PR charge

on Atal, Modi', The Telegraph, April 21, 2002.) L K

Advani, ex-home minister, publicly stated that the

police fired 3,900 rounds of ammunition.

 

The National Human Rights Commission and the

Minorities Commission 'accepted the Gujarat

government's contention that it did foresee trouble

and took precautionary steps to check it, but was

caught by surprise and overwhelmed by the mob fury

erupting on February 28.'

 

The billion-dollar question: So was Gujarat 2002

'state-sponsored' genocide against Muslims? Was it at

all genocide or a pogrom against Muslims? Or was it a

case of any number of sandbags not enough to stem the

Brahmaputra floods?

 

Anti-Sikh Riots, 1984

 

Below is an account sourced almost entirely from a

report released in the House of Commons, Britain, on

May 25 this year to mark the 20th anniversary of what

was the darkest and most humiliating year ever in the

long, glorious history of India's Sikh community. The

report was prepared by Truth & Justice Campaign,

Berkshire (London), set up a year ago 'to bring the

perpetrators of genocide to justice' (The Asian Age,

Mumbai edition, page 6, May 27, 2004).

 

The report (of which this writer has a copy) is titled

'1984 Sikhs' Kristallnacht', or 'Night of the Broken

Glass'. It is so named after the event of November 9,

1938, when a night of horror was raged, apparently

spontaneously, on Jews throughout Germany to avenge

the murder of a German embassy official in Paris by a

17-year-old Jew refugee enraged by the mass expulsion

of 10,000 Jews, including his father, to Poland.

Countless Jewish shops, synagogues, and homes went up

in flames, and several Jewish men, women, and children

were slain while trying to escape burning to death

even as the police and the fire brigade looked on.

According to William Shirer's classic book on the

Third Reich, the destruction in broken glass alone

came to five million marks.

 

The Truth & Justice Campaign's report's revelations

are highlighted below.

 

The riots: Early on November 1, 1984, hordes of people

from the suburbs of Delhi descended on various

localities where the Sikh population was concentrated.

They carried iron rods, knives, clubs, and combustible

material, including kerosene. They had voters' lists

of houses and business establishments belonging to the

Sikhs.

 

Murderous gangs of 200 people or 300 people began to

swarm into Sikh homes, hacking the occupants to

pieces, chopping off the heads of children, raping

women, tying Sikh men to tyres set aflame with

kerosene, burning down the houses and shops after

ransacking them. Mobs stopped buses and trains, in and

out of Delhi, pulling out Sikh passengers to be

lynched or doused with kerosene and burnt. An Indian

Express report of November 2 described a mob.

'Labouring at a leisurely pace, they split open

Lachman Singh's skull and pouring kerosene into the

gash set alight the half-alive man in front of Gyan

Devi, his wife.' Unlike Gujarat 2002, the violence

wasn't confined to one territory, but spread to 80

towns throughout India.

 

The provocation: On October 31, 1984, Prime Minister

Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by her two Sikh

bodyguards in revenge for Operation Bluestar. This

operation had started on May 31, when 150,000 troops

were sent to Punjab with tanks and all and the entire

state was sealed off from the rest of the country. On

June 4, Indira Gandhi had ordered the army to invade

the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, the Sikhs'

national institution, with the purpose of flushing out

Bhindranwale and his militants who had been demanding

Khalistan as an independent Sikh state. (The report

contains gory details of Operation Bluestar as well,

but they do not concern us here.)

 

The retaliation: None. Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere

just didn't put up a fight.

 

The victims: 'Thousands," says Truth & Justice

Campaign – all Sikhs. (The figure mentioned in India

is 3,000 odd – all Sikhs.) Moreover, its subject

report says, 'A reign of violence, repression and

genocide was to persist until at least 1995.'

 

Government action: The State-owned and controlled

Doordarshan and All India Radio broadcast provocative

slogans such as khoon ka badla khoon. Remember, there

were no private television channels then.

 

The rest of the Congress government's 'action' is best

expressed in the following quotes:

 

Hardly any soldiers were to be seen in the streets of

the capital. (The Guardian, UK, November 3, 1984).

Criminally led hoodlums killed Sikhs, looted or burnt

homes and properties while the police twiddled their

thumbs. (India Today, November 15, 1984)

Many people complained that, in some cases, the police

were not merely hanging back, but giving active

support. (The Times, November 5, 1984)

The new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in his maiden

speech on Delhi's Boat Club lawns did not have a word

to condemn the killings; nor did he give any assurance

to the Sikhs that the killers would be punished.

Instead, he merely used ugly words such as 'avenge,'

'anger,' 'revenge,' and explained away this

unprecedented orgy of violence comparing it with a

natural phenomenon: 'there is a shaking of the earth

whenever a big tree falls.' (Amiya Rao, 'When Delhi

Burnt', Economic and Political Weekly, December 8,

1984.)

To Rao's above quote must be added that of the late

veteran journalist, Janardan Thakur, who in his book

Prime Ministers (Published by ESHWAR, Mumbai, 1999)

wrote, 'The Prime Minister [Rajiv Gandhi] paid no

attention to the most emotive issue of the Sikhs: the

demand to punish the culprits of the massacre of Sikhs

in Delhi.'

 

Rajiv Gandhi's inaction must be seen in the context of

the joint report on the riots by the People's Union of

Civil Liberties and the People's Union of Democratic

Rights. That report mentioned the names of 16

important Congressmen and 13 police officers among

those accused by survivors and witnesses.

 

The billion-dollar question: In his article cited

above, Amiya Rao says, 'The Delhi violence was well

planned and well organised. It would have burst forth

even if Indira Gandhi had been alive.' So, were the

Sikh riots of 1984 in fact a Congress-sponsored

genocide and a pogrom? Should Saint Sonia's Congress

atone for it by kicking out Jagdish Tytler from the

UPA ministry to start with?

 

Arvind Lavakare

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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